arne360

Over on NeoGAF, where I admittedly spend too much time as it is, the monthly release of video game industry sales figures from The NPD Group is an event unmatched by anything else, except possibly the Apocalypse. I’m not kidding. It has rendered the servers for the message board entirely inoperable in the past, although that has now been made quite a bit more robust. The threads are always entertaining, filled with comments, analysis and animated gifs of every flavor — that is to say they often are pure anarchy for a few days before the posts turn to a discussion around what each console manufacturer has to do to sell better. Things always get a nice kick in gear when each manufacturer releases their statement to the NPD sales for each month and those get summarily torn to shreds too.

Now we’re seeing well-known video games journalists N’Gai Croal and Geoff Keighley get into the action through their shared “Monday Morning Quarterback” column on N’Gai Croal’s Level Up blog. They plan on a making the column a monthly look into their back and forth conversation about the NPD figures. What’s really interesting is that if you cut out all of the chaff from the NeoGAF threads, you’re not too far off from what Croal and Keighley bring up. I’ll be keeping an eye on their conversation in the coming months since this isn’t something we’re usually privy to, at least I don’t think so.