Open up the Arts and Leisure section of practically any major newspaper on a Monday morning and you'll get a detailed breakdown of the top movies in the country. Right there in black and white you can find out how many theaters showed each film and even compare weekly and cumulative box office receipts for the top movies down to the dollar.

Want similar detailed information for the games industry? You won't find it in the newspaper, and the best data you can get from most specialist magazines is incomplete and two months old when it reaches your mailbox (Read the January sales rankings... in mid-March!). Gaming web sites are a bit quicker, but in-depth statistics remain hard to find and readers still had to wait until January 11 '07 to find out how many copies of Gears of War sold in December '06. In short, the state of software and hardware sales reporting in the games press is a bit wanting.

Now I realize that there's more to covering games than simply following the horse race between the various console and game makers. Simply focusing on what's popular and what's selling does a disservice to readers who want information on the games and the culture behind them as much as (or more than) the business side of things. That being said, it's also a disservice to give readers a half-baked mothly sales ranking when more detailed information is out there waiting to be found. How are we supposed to tell our readers about the games industry if we can't even tell them what they're buying in a detailed and precise fashion?

The source for most game sales data published in the North American press is the NPD Group, a 40-year-old market intelligence firm that serves a variety of industries, technological and otherwise. Every month NPD does extensive polling of retailers across the country to extrapolate sales estimates for the major console releases of the month. NPD turns this data into a sellable product, which commands sizable fees from analysts, retailers, publishers, developers, and other interested parties.

While NPD releases its data monthly, usually a few weeks after the end of each month, similar sales tracking services in Japan (Media Create) and Europe (Chart Track) manage to get data together weekly. Media Create even publicly lists unit sales data for the top games each month, while NPD usually keeps such specifics close to its chest as far as the press is concerned (they occasionally release unit sales for the top games during the holiday season, and will release sales data for specific games to the press on a case-by-case/request basis).

This is why most major gaming magazines only list rankings for the top titles each month, rather than a detailed breakdown of unit sales. While this is good for getting a broad picture of the industry, it makes it hard to compare sales of different games directly. A number one seller in December likely sold more than a similar number one in February, but an average reader won't have any idea how much more. Similarly, it's impossible to tell from the magazine listings whether Gears of War outsold Final Fantasy XII in November '06 by a million units or just one. What's more, most magazines do little to provide any historical context to their listings—only Game Informer even bothers to mention where each game appeared on last month's list.

The online gaming sites aren't much better. Sure, they'll usually write up a news blurb when the new monthly NPD rankings come out, along with analysis that can range from facile to probing. They'll even muddy the waters with occasional announcements of hardware and software shipments from the companies themselves, often without emphasizing the difference between "shipped" and "sold."