Steam data for digital sales charts not beneficial, insists Valve

Can’t they provide detailed information to their partners, as well as to NPD?

It’s their choice not to release the data. It might mean the NPD will become irrelevant if they won’t be able to track the data from the most important digital retailers. And as far as I know, digital sales has surpassed retail sales not so long ago.

Should it be their choice though? Is there not tension between the fact that Valve is a game developer (and so competes against other game developers for consumer spend) as well as a digital distribution platform holder? Does the latter give them an unfair advantage in doing the former?

There’s probably cheaper tax on digital distribution, so Steam prob dont want to say what there sales are because eventually higher tax form will be put in place, thats my view on it anyways from a business prospective.

@4

Sorry the government will find out how much they make and if they feel its necessary they will increases taxes for it. California has taxes for digital downloads btw. This is not because they are hiding info from the government thats just silly. They just don’t want to go public about their info.

The key phrase being “what we provide to partners”.

Information = $$$. If you can tell people things that they don’t already know, and do it based on a massive userbase, then you can definitely turn that into cash money.

I can’t even begin to fathom how all of that stuff works, but I know a few people who’ve worked in internet trade organizations setting up rules for collection and use of data.

The ammount of info that you can get from a decently visited website through cookies and other things is pretty crazy, and horribly useful to vendors.

The only person who needs to know this kind of information is the publishers and developers of the games anyway.

I’m totally agree with valve in this matter. PC game, unlike console game, proven to have more longevity in its sale period. Comparing PC game release sale number with console game sale number a week after its launched will not prove that PC will have a poor sales or not, eventhough pc sales are way down its console counterpart!

PC gamer knows value of a game and will not buy it in day one just because of its a AAA title being developed by AAA developer, except if its come from very reputable PC developer like Blizzard or Valve and a few indie developer, they tend to wait until its have reasonable price and or until they upgraded some of their PC hardware component in order to play at its possible maximum state(for example the first CRYSIS, I’m sure its still sold nowadays due to the latter). It wont happen in console due to limited compatibility with their ancestor and different mindset between most of the console gamer with PC gamer ( of course, savvy console gamer are not included)!

I’m very sure, it wont hurt anybody by not releasing their sales figure to the public. It wont pleased any fanboys either (whether its PC or console fanboys).But as we can see nowadays, a lot of big developer (and publisher) still releasing their game for PC are exact prove that PC is still healthy as a platform no matter what opinion grows around it .

..are Valve not gaining a commercial advantage over other developers by having this information?

@9 Maybe if they wanted to create a generic mush of what’s hot these days, but I don’t really see that as being part of their profile, past, present or future.

Making a creative product based on statistics or focus groups won’t lead to a very good one.