I'm glad Mat is here but I feel like he's here just to make sure we don't leak anything lol
You think I need to post here and engage as much as I do to look for leaks? And given that a majority of people that did decide to post proprietary info at great personal risk in the past were run off by the community itself in its selfish and incessant demand for more and more, I don't think that spending the time I do to just look for leakers would be good ROI.
I'm here because my thinking is challenged, there are smart people here and it's fun. I give enough information out that if you're smart enough you can figure the rest out. If you're not smart enough, there are others who are.
Yes, I appreciate you putting up with me :)
They're all good questions. And it's complicated.
I'd love nothing more than to include all publishers, all game and DLC/MTX sales, and everything else to into the monthly release.
Unfortunately, we only have agreements in place with certain publishers to include certain points of information.
No DLC or MTX is currently included in the monthly spend included in the media release. The beta program for DLC/MTX continues and I hope it will be included in the future. We also continue to have conversations to expand the coverage of full game digital downloads, and I expect big news on that front in the near future.
We continue to look at ways we can adjust the monthly release to include sales of untracked products using extrapolation methodology. However, it would be much better if we had a full sample, so that continues to be the goal.
To answer your question, yes of course MTX spending is important, as are the other categories not covered in the media release.
We construct a quarterly report called Games Market Dynamics, where we project for total market including things like MTX, Mobile, Subscriptions, etc. and construct a total annual spend number for the Entertainment Software Association that releases each January.
So consider the media release a snapshot which includes 100% of physical retail along with a coverage percentage of digital full game sales across PSN, XBL and STEAM. The software market is bigger than is being reported because we are missing publishers, distribution platforms like eShop, Origin, Battle.net and uPlay and DLC/MTX.