Today, the NPD Group has officially announced that it has discontinued any plans to release hardware sales figures on a monthly basis for the gaming industry. Surprisingly, this comes as a shock as it something not many people saw coming and definitely removes one of the key highlights a lot of gamers looked forward to on a monthly basis (despite negatively driven).

Obviously, this decision comes down more-so to money than it does anything else as the NPD Group uses a subscription service in order to service subscribers with this information. By canning the amount of free information being released to the public, it should push more people into subscribing to the service to find out the details they’re looking for.

According to the NPD Group, they don’t feel as though this has changed anything and have encouraged the hardware companies to release its monthly figures to the public as they see fit.

“Clients can release their figures, which we can verify, but it shouldn’t be up to NPD to release these figures. Our corporate publishing guidelines changed, but nothing has changed client-side.”

How do you guys feel about this decision? Is this something that you feel hampers part of the monthly excitement the industry provided from an outside source? Do you think this will have a positive effect on the console war that often plagues forums or do you think this will make it worse without any concrete data to back things up now?

Let us know below.