Topic: Sales figures for digital games (eShop, VC)?

[tendoboy1984]

Will Nintendo ever release sales figures for eShop and Virtual Console games?

[Shaymin]

When they stop being rounding errors.

So that would be a /thread

[TJ Spyke]

Will Nintendo ever release sales figures for eShop and Virtual Console games?

Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Apple, Electronic Arts, Google don't. So I don't see Nintendo being the only one who does.

[azeke]

Will Nintendo ever release sales figures for eShop and Virtual Console games?

Probably not. Sales of retail games on eShop -- maybe, sometime, as they already do in Japan.

The closest we have is coffeewithgames (who has an account here) who provides some data that will give at least the lowest estimate:

Yes, and I try to make sure to never quote anything as "sales" data, unless it's the Virtual Console and WiiWare titles, because then it's easy to do the math on the reported numbers and how much has possibly been made... but even then it's never stated as ALL sold.

Thanks for the site and your work!

Just went through your reports about VC games:
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has 240,177 Wii owners that have reported game-play data through the Nintendo Channel in the United States, with 1,722 days possibly reported
Super Smash Bros. has 1,126,147 Total Hours of game-play reported, from approximately 71,107 U.S. Wii owners that have reported data
Super Mario Bros. 3 has approximately 798,090 U.S. Wii owners that have reported game-play data through the Nintendo Channel, with 1,701 days reported
Paper Mario has approximately 191,273 U.S. Wii owners that have reported hours through the Nintendo Channel, with 1,862 days possibly reported since the game released
Super Mario 64 has about 305,260 Wii owners that have reported game-play data through the Wii's Nintendo Channel, with 1,772 days possibly reported since it was released.
Super Mario Bros. has approximately 618,052 U.S. Wii owners that have reported game-play hours through the Nintendo Channel, with 2,051 days possibly reported
Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards now has 935,279 Total Hours of gameplay reported, from approximately 89,306 U.S. Wii owners that have reported data through the Wii's Nintendo Channel
F-Zero X has 195,195 Total Hours of gameplay reported, from approximately 31,743 U.S. Wii owners that have reported gameplay hours through the Nintendo Channel since its U.S. release
Approximately 29,551 U.S. Wii owners have reported playing Wave Race 64 through the Wii's Nintendo Channel

Not bad for a bunch of roms, eh?

[tendoboy1984]

I know about coffewithgames, he's a regular commenter at GoNintendo.

[Mop it up]

They've given some vague figures for certain games before, but that's all.

[rlse9]

Probably never going to happen.  For whatever reason, companies like to always give as little information about sales figures as they can if possible.  Even extremely successful companies like Apple and Amazon are vague with their sales figures and only talk about growth or sales numbers for a product line as a whole instead of releasing information about individual products.  It seems kind of crazy to me, but the experts in charge of marketing and PR and so on at all of these companies obviously know something...

[azeke]

Even extremely successful companies like Apple and Amazon are vague with their sales figures and only talk about growth or sales numbers for a product line as a whole instead of releasing information about individual products.

Apple did gave their total sales number for AppStore last year i think? It was in billions, but still very low compared to traditional console/handheld sales.

[NWR_insanolord]

Companies will announce numbers themselves selectively, when they want to brag about something. They don't want people to know when things don't do well. It doesn't usually help Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony/Apple/Amazon/whoever to publicly announce those numbers, so they don't unless they have to or want to.

[nickmitch]

A company (especially public ones) have to be careful about what numbers they put out there. I remember Apple doing some sort of contest for the billionth (maybe ten billionth or both) app download. Those milestones are the best you're going to get. The problem is that investors may over react if certain numbers don't seem impressive because there's little to compare them to. Even if others were publishing download numbers, it would almost never be an apples to apples comparison.

[tendoboy1984]

Publishers have no problem showing sales figures for retail games, so why are they so reluctant to show sales figures for digital games?

[TJ Spyke]

Actually, publishers rarely show sales figures for retail games. The only time they really do is when the game does really well. With digital services, they have to get permission from the platform holder (i.e. Valve for Steam, Nintendo for eShop, etc.).

[NWR_insanolord]

The numbers we get for retail games are provided by retailers, not publishers.

[TJ Spyke]

Uh-huh, and I am sure Walmart is happy to tell GameStop their numbers. I don't recall retailers ever providing us sales numbers for games. They report them to NPD, and NPD sometimes rarely shares general info. Most of the time it is the publishers giving out the numbers.

[NWR_insanolord]

When I said "the numbers we get" I was referring to the NPD numbers. We may not get solid info from those all the time, but we get them a hell of  a lot more frequently than we do from publishers.

[nickmitch]

And the reason why retailers are cool with reporting to NPD is because it helps them project sales. Knowing that a thing sold X can let a retailer know exactly what percentage of X was sold by them. Next time a product is launched and projects to sell roughly Y, they can apply the same percentage (provided it's a comparable item). It's a give an take relationship that I think Walmart was reluctant to join for a while (if I remember from something I was told a while ago from a manager correctly).