whenver it gets to that NPD time of the month I start to feel a little sick. The thought of all the fanboys going crazy and boasting that they’ve won the console war once and for all is something that fills me with a dead abiding dread. The problem is, that sales are use as a yardstick of success, and of course, for the company executives of business analysts, it is the conculding factor in determining whether or not a game has been a success.

But should that matter for us, the consumer? We are supposed to play games for the pleasure of it, for those of us without a finacial stake involved with the publishers or the developers, there is no tangible benefit to us, for seeing Prototype outsell Infamous, or the DS outsell the PSP.

The funny thing is that no one ever uses sales figures for Nintendo’s consoles when they argue on forums, perhaps this shows that part of the truth is getting through to them. It doesn’t matter if Wii Fit outsells Halo 3, because enjoyment of one is not mutually exclusive from enjoyment of the other. Good games often sell well, but there is a percentage of the market who don’t do research before they buy a product, and who don’t use the game after they buy it anyway.

If you want to talk about the finacial state of a company, profit margins, stock prices or other business related topics, feel free to use sales figures as much as you like. If you need to talk about sales to prove that a game is good, you are probably fooling yourself.