MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Next week, we will not be running a charts section within MCV Magazine.
The two pages we devote to charts aren’t good enough. The Steam charts are global, and Valve hasn’t responded to our requests for a UK-focused Top Ten. Microsoft kindly supply us with an Xbox Live chart, but they’re only able to include digital 360 games. Sony started supplying PSN information, but stopped over a year ago.
And as for the main chart – the All-Formats Top 40 – it misses out on the rapidly growing digital sector, which means it’s not an accurate representation of our industry or what consumers are buying.
Could we use these pages more wisely? It’s a question we’ve been wrestling with for some time now, and we have decided that yes, we could. So for the first time in 17 years, MCV will not be running a regular charts page.
You’ll still find these charts on our website (including the iPhone and iPad charts, which are actually very good). But until the industry starts developing a proper, accurate ranking of the most popular games, we won’t be printing them within these pages.
MCV has long campaigned for the need to share data so that the games industry can grow and highlight to politicians and investors just how exciting our market is.
But even a boring-old Top Ten has its PR advantages. Look at our sister industries and how they promote their products:
‘Go Set a Watchman. A New York Time’s Best-Seller’
‘The Number One album by Ellie Golding’
‘The Box Office Smash Hit of the summer, Inside Out’.
Last week, Sony should have been calling Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture: ‘The UK’s most popular video game’.
But that’s not what our Top 40 says, so it was unable to do that.
This is what today’s edition of MCV is all about – one major plea to the decision makers from across the game world to share their sales figures.
You don’t have to give that information to us – I appreciate we are just a bunch of untrustworthy journalists. But share it with NPD and Enterbrain and Chart-Track. Let them put together a better chart.
So that we, and you, and our friends in the consumer media, can get behind the wonderful successes that we are missing almost every week.
