Game Sales Question

[crazyjackcsa]

I've been wondering, is there a place to track game sales online? I recently picked up de Blob for the Wii and ever since have been wondering about it's sales. That got me thinking about other "smaller" games I have Battalion Wars for instance, or perhaps Boom Blox. Is there anyplace online that I can find info about total sales? vgchartz.com isn't bad, but even older Wii games haven't been updated for about a year, and thesimsexchange.com is all about predicitons. Does anybody know where I could find some of this info?

[Clownzilla]

An industry trade publication would be your best bet. The home video game industry should have one (like any industry) but I have no clue of any particular names. The information in these publications are geared towards sales, distribution, business news, etc. The production data should tell you everything from the exact days for production runs, production volume, shipping volume, factory where produced, etc. This would have all the info you could possibly need!

[neist]

Video game sales numbers are a pretty secret thing, as it turns out. The major group who releases numbers is the NPD group (http://www.npd.com/). Unfortunately, they will only openly disclose numbers if you pay them a large sum of undisclosed money (only undisclosed because no media venue that I know of has ever published how much it costs them).

Most of the major gaming media outlets on the internet subscribe to them, and they are allowed to release numbers outside of a certain specificity. Thats where you hear random numbers like "Bioshock sold over 800k units".

There are flaws to NPD numbers, however, as theres a number of retail chains that the numbers do not cover. Walmart, last I heard, was not covered by the NPD group, which is unfortunate as a recent survey states that the majority portion of consumers buy their games at Walmart.

At any rate, NPD numbers are your best bet for the US, and they aren't all that great. If you google "NPD Video Game" I'm sure you'll find some good examples of the numbers.

Now, if you want Japan numbers, apparently they are somewhere on this site:

http://www.enterbrain.co.jp/index.html

I don't read Japanese at all, so I cant be much help there. :)

[emceelokey]

On another site, someone that posts on that site actually worked as a developer and said the same thing as the above post in which they pay a large sum, like $2000 for the sale figures. I don't know if it's a subscription type of thing or if it's quarterly or whatever but it's a hefty sum. He also said that Wal-Mart doesn't release their numbers as well. I believe the whole significance of buying the number was to see how well sertain types of games were doing and for what consoles. He was posting a bunch of request for a while but I guess it just died off but the thread went to the 1000+ post mark. It was a fun read. Let's just say that those PetZ and DogZ and HorseZ games for the DS were money makers.

[moycon]

Here ya go.

http://www.vgchartz.com/

My undrestanding is that some of the newest information is guess-timates, until the NPD numbers are released and then the site is updated with the actual information. You should be able to find what you're looking for here crazyjackcsa.

[crazyjackcsa]

vgchartz.com doesn't seem to update on older games, and by older I mean games over a year old also, the info is sporadic at best. According to vgchartz, de Blob hasn't sold one copy in Japan, and Battalion Wars 2 hasn't sold any copies in "others"

[neist]

vgchartz.com doesn't seem to update on older games, and by older I mean games over a year old also, the info is sporadic at best. According to vgchartz, de Blob hasn't sold one copy in Japan, and Battalion Wars 2 hasn't sold any copies in "others"

Yea, VGchartz stated that Castle Shikigami 3 sales were in the hundreds, not thousands, a few weeks after launch.

I'm fairly skeptical of their numbers most of the time.

[Satac]

You should check out NeoGAF.com , because their users are crazy about sales charts. There's also a nice blog:

http://chartget.blogspot.com/