by 
When it comes to sales reports across the games industry, some of them only provide estimated figures because analysis firms don't have all the definitive details, but Circana actually receives digital sales data from various publishers including Sony, SEGA, Konami, Capcom and others - and until very recently, Xbox and EA as well.
However, the firm is reporting this week (via Kotaku) that both Xbox and EA have decided to pull out of sharing their digital sales data with Circana, although neither company has responded to a request for comment yet. This means that it'll become much harder and less accurate for them to track digital sales data in the US.
Kotaku does a good job of explaining what this actually means:
"Circana’s “digital data sharing panel” is essentially a group of publishers that willingly share some or all of that digital data, and until recently, Xbox and EA were a part of it. That means they shared data on games sold on on their storefronts, so we had accurate information about how well games sold on the Xbox and EA digital storefronts were doing in every Circana report. This was in stark contrast to, say, Nintendo, who does not share digital data and whose appearance in Circana’s charts is based off (well-educated) estimates and analysis."
The report claims that Xbox pulling out is a "huge problem in particular" as not only does it provide less transparency about how Xbox first-party titles are performing, but it also "further obscures" the sales figures for third-party games when those publishers aren't already providing their digital data to Circana.
Ultimately, it's just a bummer for those of us who like to track this kind of thing. Transparency is always nice to have when it comes to sales data, and unfortunately it sounds like we're going to have to rely on estimates even more in the future. There's also a suggestion (but not confirmation) that Xbox might have pulled out of sharing data with a firm known as GSD, which does a similar job to Circana but in Europe.
We'll let you know if we hear anything more about this and exactly why Xbox has decided to pull out, but we're not expecting an answer - multiple companies have done this in the past including Take-Two, Ubisoft and others, so it's not like it hasn't happened before. For what it's worth, Take-Two actually ended up returning to the Circana panel and sharing their data again, so perhaps Xbox will do the same as well in the future. We'll see.