RS: At , NPD presented in front of all the attendees that research and I was pulling my hair out. Where they come up with these figures is just unbelievably unfathomable to me because when you go look in markets where the console doesn't even have an audience at all, I mean, maybe in North America you could say that going from a small amount of people playing online to a large amount of people playing online on console represents big growth, okay. And while they're conceivably taking a larger percentage of the online gaming pie for console, the overall number of consoles isn't really changing, it's just that more people are playing online. It's deceiving. Where in the world did they come up with those figures? There's no tracking mechanism that exists on NPD's part to be able to substantiate that data.

GO: If the methodology's survey-based, why present it in the first place?

RS: What NPD said in that particular study was that broadband grew by six percent year-over-year in general for all of online gaming, and console during that period increased by 25 percent. What they didn't mention was the basis, you know, what are you actually basing that on. Just because the new generation of consoles are all online connected? Is there some revenue number that you want to point out? There was nothing there, no meat to it. It was just a fact that was thrown out. The best I could come up with was that they extrapolated that data based on the increases in the numbers of units sold of the Sony's, the Microsoft's, Nintendo's latest generation, and the fact that they're all potentially connected to the Internet.

At the same time, PC gaming actually went up in terms of numbers of total online gamers, and this is a U.S. study only that they published, by half a million. They didn't draw anybody's attention to that, they just said that the percent of all gamers went down for PC, even though there was a net gain in total PC gamers of half a million. There's obviously a presupposition to show and highlight the games by console, which is the underlying theme here, and the reductions by PC. I've gotten no response from them, by the way, why they would highlight it the way that they did.

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