NPD Will Continue to Release Game Sales Data

When industry tracker the NPD Group announced last week it would be scaling back its data released to the media at large, the company received an overwhelmingly negative response. Today, the group has addressed the cries of protest by reinstating the group's prior policy in full. "Honestly, it was terribly naive of me to think that we could simply stop providing these after giving them freely for a year," said the NPD Group's David Riley in an e-mail to Next-Gen. NPD had planned on restricting access to monthly data--including monthly hardware sales of gaming consoles--to paying clients. This would've left it up to console makers to release the numbers at their own discretion to members of the media. Riley assured the NPD Group would be providing the sales figures to the media "indefinitely."