Why it's increasingly significant that there's no DLC in NPD

As everyone prepares for NPD's report of what was likely a slow- to no-growth March for the video game industry (thanks largely to tough comparisons to last year's mega-hit "Super Smash Bros. Brawl"), I'm particularly struck by this point made by research firm EEDAR in its sales preview:

I've previously written about how important I think DLC is becoming to the Xbox 360 / Playstation 3 business model. To take a recent example, I'm told by a good source (though Rockstar hasn't confirmed) that "Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned" has sold around one million units on Xbox Live. That's over $20 million in gross revenue and would be approximately $14 million for Rockstar, if it hadn't already done a $50 million deal for two DLC chapters with Microsoft.

"Call of Duty: World at War" similarly sold a million-plus units of its "map pack 1." That's over $10 million in revenue and more than $7 million forActivision (given the way Bobby Kotick drives deals, I'm willing to bet Activision gets more than the standard 70% from Sony and Microsoft). 

Most importantly, the margins are much better for both pieces of DLC than standard retail games. While they arguably have one-third and one-sixth, respectively of their original games' content (thus justifying the consumer price ratios), the production budgets are much lower than that. After all, they reuse the same engine, art style, user interface, asthe retail titles. That stuff is expensive to design.

For most AAA 360/PS3 games to make an extra 10% in revenue, with higher profit margins, by next year, is a very big deal. But we'll never understand just how important it is. At least not in a systematic way. BecauseNPD doesn't track download sales. Microsoft and Sony, the sellers in this case, guard that data jealously.

Sure, occasionally they or the publishers issue press releases when they have a big hit, as with "World at War." And publishers will inevitably give Wall Street some insight into their DLC revenue as it becomes an increasingly important part of their bottom lines.

But the numbers will be scattershot. We won't have any comprehensive tracking the way we (kinda) do with NPD.

Add PC sales, cell phones, and Web gaming to the growing amount of DLC and there's a huge video game industry outside of the retail consoles sales NPD tracks. Which means the figures upon which most of us analysts, journalists, and other interested folks rely are becoming less representative of the business, particularly its high growth areas.

More and more, it seems like the the NPD figures are becoming for the video game biz what box office grosses are for film: An important set of data that shows only one part of a dynamic and diverse industry.