THQ: Industry healthier than NPD says

THQ has warned investors not to look at just NPD boxed product sales charts when judging the state of the industry.

The publisher’s CEO Brian Farrell said the digital side of THQ’s business is performing well but isn’t reflected in NPD’s monthly US video game charts.

In an interview with Gamespot he said: Let’s look at what NPD doesn’t do now – no DLC revenues, no MMO subscription revenues and it doesn’t track iPad or iPhone revenues.

I’m not being critical of them but it’s just a lot of investors or people who look at the industry and see the NPD box product sales are down.”

Our point of view is that more people are playing games than ever before. And we as an industry need to come up with a different way to look at the industry to capture all those revenue streams.

Our Steam business is going through the roof, but that’s not reported as part of NPD. So I think the industry is a lot healthier than just what NPD is reporting.”

He was also optimistic about the growth of THQ going into next year.

When we look into next year, we’re really pleased with what’s going on with PS3, Wii and 360 hardware sales,” Farrell added. And all that hardware is going to buy new software.

So we think with these emerging businesses, along with all the online and the unreported things, plus the fact that people are buying software for the game machines that they’re buying now, we think 2011 should be a stronger year for the industry.

And I think with our line-up, I think it’s going to be a particularly good one for us.”

GfK Chart-Track announced earlier this year that the UK will get a PC games download chart.