A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Baste
Here's Anita Frazier of NPD, talking about why they no longer report hardware sales/software sales to the public:"While this news was, in some cases, a hard pill for some to swallow, we believe it is an important step for the industry," said Anita Fazier, analyst at NPD. "Why? Because we've long acknowledged that our reporting of monthly point-of-sale purchases (covering new physical sales of hardware, software and accessories only, not used game sales) did not represent 100 per cent of the consumer spend on the industry.
"Since new physical sales at retail have been down for some months now, the news that the industry is beleaguered has been widely covered, and it has caused unnecessary angst for many," she added. Is NPD compiling data on the videogame industry or YMCA soccer?
Well, I can certainly understand why they wouldn't want to report sales of new consoles, because the non-physical sales of hardware have soared in the last few years.
Wouldn't the logical thing to do here would be to add a separate category to cover the "other" sales that they're not capturing? Wouldn't that be a way to make the picture clearer, instead of creating a new, bigger category that actually reduces clarity? Wouldn't anyone over ten be able to figure this out?
Let's use Occam's Razor here. It is absolutely impossible that Anita Frazier, or indeed, any sentient human, could be this stupid. That means that there are companies in the industry who don't want sales numbers being published, and she's had to contort herself to fit into someone else's Big Box Of Stupid.
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