Download charts ‘worth the wait’

The UK digital sales charts have been a long time coming, but Sega’s John Clark is confident the industry will be satisfied.

The managing director for Sega’s UK arm also heads up the publisher’s digital projects, and has been involved with the creation of the digital charts from the beginning.While there is still no word on an official launch outside of ‘early 2012′, Clark promises that significant progress” has been made.

Asking companies to share their precious digital sales figures with their closest competitors was an ambitious objective,” he said. "But UKIE has managed to get support from a substantial number of publishers and digital distributors and I am confident that the results will be worth the wait.”

The publisher boss went on to re-emphasise the importance of introducing such sales metrics, claiming they are vital” to better understanding the changing games market.

It is no exaggeration to say that many businesses use the current charts as a key business planning tool,” said Clark. But their weakness is that they do not include any digital sales. As this channel grows, it is vital that we measure performance of the whole market, our own products and also our performance against other companies’ products.

There are also a plethora of firms only on digital platforms that are not getting the much-needed exposure they deserve.”