An allergy to transparency | This Week in Business
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.
This industry is terrified of transparency.
From the secrecy around development to the unnecessary NDAs on everything from ex-employees to underwhelming embargoed news, the games industry likes nothing so much as playing its cards close to the chest.
It's pathological, and it has been consistent for as long as I've been covering the industry.
Was that E3 trailer pre-rendered or in-engine? Is the DLC on the original game disc or downloaded after the fact? Is your game using NFTs?
Even when a bit of secrecy is justified – marketing plans are a thing and there's no need for everyone to know every game you're working on at any given moment – the enthusiasm with which companies like Epic, The Pokémon Company, and MiHoYo sue people for leaking game news is unsettling.
The industry's inclination towards opacity has never been great, and it has gotten worse over the years.
STAT | 326,000 – The number of Xbox 360s Microsoft sold in the US during its first five days on sale, 59% of what the original Xbox sold in its first week, as reported by the NPD Group in December of 2005.
Read the rest of that article and compare the information we used to get about sales to what we see today. Exact sales figures for games. Year-over-year comparisons for franchises and individual publishers. A veritable buffet of actual data, some of it coming directly from the NPD, other bits coming from analysts freely sharing points of interest from the month's numbers.
These days, Circana (formerly NPD)
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
