NPD Data No Longer Relevant for Electronic Arts

Publisher Electronic Arts is aiming to become a company that is 100 percent focused on digital game distribution and sale, and that means that the sale information, which is offered each month by the NPD Group, is becoming less and less important to the company and no longer impacts its long-term strategy.

Frank Gibeau, who is the executive leading the EA Games label and has recently been vocal about his company’s future, told Games Industry that, “It’s an irrelevant measure on the industry. It’s totally irrelevant. We don’t even really look at it internally anymore.”

He added, “We’re more focused on our services and how we’re connected with consumers. The number of Nucleus accounts we’re growing, the amount of engagement time that we have, the amount of services that we’re running – those are more important metrics for us than unit sales according to NPD and North America.”

The NPD Group is only tracking new physical sales in the United States and has been criticized for offering misleading information to the public and the companies it serves.

It has since announced that it plans to introduce tracking for digital sales.

A recent Online 2012 report from the NPD Group shows that for the first quarter of the year the revenue that the video game industry has extracted from rentals, digital sales, used game sales and subscriptions has dwarfed what it has obtained from new retail sales.

More and more players also seem to prefer getting their video game via digital services, like Steam, Origin or GamersGate, and that many of them also have both a digital and physical copy of their favorite titles.

Electronic Arts is working hard to make its own Origin more popular, trying to offer exclusive titles to it and get to a size where it can compete with Steam.

Via: NPD Data No Longer Relevant for Electronic Arts