I'd rather have walmart reporting than toys(it's at least 10x the volume), not sure Toys ever was though.
NPD June 2011
- Thread starter AlNom
- Start date
I'd rather have walmart reporting than toys(it's at least 10x the volume), not sure Toys ever was though.
TRU was previously included, I'm not sure why they pulled out or if they are included again but they were definitely a member org.
Couldn't that screw the demographics a bit though? Unless you get exactly the same customers in WalMart, ToysRUs and GameStop etc., sales can't be uniformly extrapolated. TBH I doubt it makes a great deal of difference, but I dare say you get slightly different game sales in TrU than in GameStop.
I'm pretty sure TRU is a very small segment of the market. I know I remember reading some stuff about that once. I'm pretty sure in the single percent digits. I wouldn't worry about it.
If they get Gamestop, Wal Mart, Best Buy, Target, that will be the vast vast majority.
I do recall at one time them trumpeting getting Amazon and some others, at the same time they lost TRU I believe. I recall them stating the retailers they added would soon outweight TRU anyway.
I think it changes a lot who they have because I want to say they lost Amazon later too. Who really knows I have no hard knowledge of who they do or dont cover this is all just hearsay I remember reading, a lot of it on Vgchartz. They may have both Amazon and TRU back for all I know.
But I do consistently remember the 60% of the market figure, and if you add in Wal Mart it should approach 100%.
If they get Gamestop, Wal Mart, Best Buy, Target, that will be the vast vast majority.
I do recall at one time them trumpeting getting Amazon and some others, at the same time they lost TRU I believe. I recall them stating the retailers they added would soon outweight TRU anyway.
I think it changes a lot who they have because I want to say they lost Amazon later too. Who really knows I have no hard knowledge of who they do or dont cover this is all just hearsay I remember reading, a lot of it on Vgchartz. They may have both Amazon and TRU back for all I know.
But I do consistently remember the 60% of the market figure, and if you add in Wal Mart it should approach 100%.
It's not so much the tiny percentage, but the relevant percentage of some sectors. eg. If 50,000 little girls buy Barbie's 3DS Adventures from Toy R Us, where the same demographic won't be shopping from Walmart or Gamestop, then the sales figures for the top ten won't be at all accurate. As I say, it's probably a minor variation in real terms, but I would be interested in seeing how demographics vary with shops, and whether the whole market is equally represented by a subsection of stores or if substantial sections of market get overlooked.
Demographics definitely vary by the stores but TRU is not a loss at all Wal-Mart is orders of magnitude more important in terms of sales and they have demographic overlap. But again Wal-Mart was "effectively" covered with the NPD panels such that the platform holders took their yearly numbers to be accurate enough. NPD gets numbers for ~60% of the market but they estimate for 100% of the market. I DO expect some titles that the gaming boards don't much care for to pick up thousands more sold-through but not so much that the non-numbers we get now
would matter, maybe, in the top 11-20 range would things change but even then I'm not sure how much. I believe I mentioned before that amazon.com is covered by NPD as well so they actually have a really good mix from which to extrapolate. In your example, Shifty, some/many/most of those Barbie 3DS sales would be discovered through the panels. But I'm having a hard time envisioning how that would change the top 10. While gamestop saw an increase in marketshare last holiday quarter toys r us actually saw a decline. I know this isn't just about Toys R Us but for whatever reason I have high confidence in NPDs numbers for retail. I'm hesitant on their digital numbers because its new for them, I imagine at least three or four or more formulae changes before I would feel confident in those numbers OR if the platform holders or publishers started using those numbers.
Separate note, NPD tracks a hell of a lot more than they release to the public. So when public releases say things like "doesn't include hardware bundles" this doesn't mean they don't track them it simply means they are not releasing those numbers to the public because they absolutely have them. To get a VERY generic idea of what the reports contain you could view some old GAF NPD (2004 ish or before) threads where the top 100 or more would be released.
EDIT2: The best public discussion of NPD numbers is still the Microsoft audio I linked some years ago where one of their business analysts was breaking it down.
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
I'm pretty sure Toys'R'Us was small enough that it didn't significantly skew results as much as something like GameStop. If anything Walmart will include pretty much the same demographic as GameStop but probably increase the accurancy of sales information with regards to casual titles.
In other words, I don't think the accuracy of sales numbers (not percentages) for "core" games will be impacted, but the sales numbers for "casual" games might become more accurate.
Regards,
SB
I threw that link on the ground! Im not a part of this system!
