No, not the french New Democrats. The market research firm. They announced via the LevelUp blog on Monday that NPD Group would no longer be providing hardware sales figures to the general public.

If you haven’t heard of the NPD figures as they relate to videogames, this means that you are relatively well-adjusted. If you obsess over them every month, examining sell-through frequencies and attach rates, then you are a sad little dork who gets a kick out of “analyzing” console sales figures. There is an army of these sad little dorks on NeoGAF, who love the NPDs. When these figures were cancelled (as NPD always said the hardware info would be temporary, a year ago) they kind of freaked out.

I have no sympathy. I always found the NPDs to bring out the worst in discussion about videogames – who the fuck cares how well it sells, besides the parent company? Do you really care how many copies of Halo 3 sold? Unless you work for Microsoft, you shouldn’t.

It’s the geek obsession with Numbers – which processor has a higher frequency, who has more RAM, which costs less, which has more USB ports, which sells better in Japan, which game they haven’t yet played got a 9.5 instead of a 10 and exactly how outrageous that is, etc. Numbers lead to futile arguments in a desperate attempt to quantify objects or experiences that are essentially a mix of inalienable elements.

Also amusing is the reaction by NPD itself, who are shocked, shocked that there is such a hue and cry over this change in policy. And why shouldn’t they be surprised? Imagine if you worked at a company that tracked, amongst many other things, the sales of steak-knives. Your division releases steak-knife figures. One day you decide that this really isn’t helping your clients, who sort of know how many steak-knives they sell by counting the money that comes in, so you make a small press release to announce the stop. That’s when the rabid gang of super-steak-knife fans descend on you, overwhelm your fax machine, and demand that you continue to produce these figures for their amusement because there are serious debates on the internet about the veracity and worth of both the steak-knives as well as those who make steak-knives.

Now I understand that it can be an amusing pasttime to look at these figures, as one would box office returns or the like. I simply relegate that particular kind of amusement to the realm of business fapping. In other words: far, far away from critical discussion of interactive fiction, which I find to be distinctly more interesting and nuanced than a spreadsheet.

So good riddance to NPD. The VG Chartz guys must be ecstatic; not that you should trust them either. I recommend playing some games, maybe chatting about that, and leaving the sales numbers to those individuals with incurable tribal identity issues.