Well, it’s finally happened. After many happy years of having the most informative sales charts of any entertainment medium in Europe if not the world, the weekly Chart-Track reports have been savagely emasculated, most of their meaning eye-wateringly sliced off in favour of a simple who’s-the-best? listing, with the real meat denied to most people for an eternal five weeks. But even now, if you ask most people in the industry, they simply don’t understand what all the hoo-haa was about in the first place. What was wrong with the charts the way they were? Who’s responsible for the way they are now? While negotiations were still continuing, I spoke to the people best placed to provide the answers, but it’s only now, after a five-week delay to prevent giving valuable information away to our opposition, that the results can be revealed. First under the spotlight was Chart-Track’s Dorian Bloch.

CTW: So what’s this all about, then? Our charts are great, aren’t they? If they ain’t broke, why are we fixing them?

DB: The actual basic situation is that Electronics Boutique are unhappy with the weekly service we produce, because they feel that as the dominant retailer, they’re giving too much information away.

CTW: Isn’t that rather fundamental to the nature of a chart, though?

DB: Well, yes, that’s true, but that’s how they feel, and the difficulty is that some of the other retailers aren’t very happy about that at all – not having a weekly service, or having a weekly service with no actual units or value information.

CTW: What use is a sales chart that doesn’t tell you what the sales are? That seems rather pointless.

DB: Well, yes, it does, doesn’t it?

CTW: Why are EB getting to throw their weight around on the subject? According to the listings, they only account for around 16% of the 3000-odd shops which provide data for the chart.

DB: It’s to do with market share – their market share is very large. I’m not allowed to tell you how large exactly, but they are the dominant retailer.

CTW: Fair enough. The reason these negotiations have taken so long, though, is that many other retailers have threatened to pull out of the chart if EB get their way. Why would they want to do that?

DB: Because in the UK we have what is quoted by many sources as being the fastest, most accurate product of its type in the world. If you look at similar industries, like music, videos or books, you’ll find that there is a weekly tracking service which is of benefit to publishers as well as retailers. If you want to continue with that service as it is, then there’s really only one way of doing that, and that’s to come off the panel, and maybe hope that everybody else does too, in which case there’s nothing left, we all go home and pack up, and that’s the end of it. Maybe they feel that EB will back down in the face of that situation, but we don’t know – we’re in a situation where we could be losing some retailers and seeing the end of charts as we know them. We do feel that there will be a compromise reached that all parties will be happy with, but we don’t really want to say any more about it than that.

And so it turned out. Despite the discussions having dragged on for over a year, it was pretty obvious to anyone that there were only three possibilities – everything stayed the way it was and EB pulled out, EB got their own way and everyone else pulled out, or the only possible compromise, the sales figures staying but being delayed for a period of time. After what we can only imagine to have been the world’s longest haggle – "Six months!"; "No, a week!"; "Okay, five and-three-quarter months!"; "Nine days!" – the current agreement of a month, give or take the odd day, was reached. Having achieved what they wanted, we assume EB must be delighted. But what was it, actually, that they’d been wanting to get out of it all this time? Only John Steinbrecher could tell me that.

CTW: As far as I can see, your main stated reason for wanting to pull out of the weekly charts is that they give hints to your rivals’ buyers. Now, that seems to me to be a faintly extraordinary thing to say. These people are professional buyers, but you’re implying that they’d be simply missing major game releases, like, "Oh my God! Gran Turismo 3 came out when we weren’t looking and we haven’t stocked any! Damn!"

JS: Well, of course there are triple-A releases, but there are also secondary releases. It’s been suggested that they could just come into our shop and see what we were doing that way, but you can’t see whether something’s successful or not until you see the numbers. We do it with competitors – if we get a low market share for some particular week, we look at who’s doing what and see who’s made an impact. I think it’s the other way around, I think it’s you who’s underestimating the skills of these buyers. Any good quality buyer takes every piece of information they can to make their judgement. So why are we giving them more information? In no way am I criticising other buyers.

CTW: But that doesn’t make much sense. You’re suggesting that buyers work in a completely reactive rather than proactive way, which seems unlikely in a business where a huge proportion of sales are made in the first two weeks of release anyway.

JS: See, I can’t really explain it to you any more without giving away competitive things. I think part of the problem here is that in order for us to explain it well enough that people will understand more why we’re doing it, they’ll understand other things.

CTW: Do you understand why everyone else is so upset about it?

JS: No, I don’t. Let’s go off the record here…

And we did, though no secrets were revealed and nothing was significantly clearer at the end of it. Tape recorder back on…

CTW: It’s been suggested by quite a few of the people CTW’s spoken to about it that the real reason for all this is to get Chart-Track to pay for EB’s sales info.

JS: Nowhere, not once in any of the discussions we’ve been having with Chart-Track about how to handle this and deal with the sensitivity of the data, has the subject of paying for the data come up. I don’t know where that’s coming from.

CTW: Are you concerned that there seems to be a real possibility that your actions are going to bring down the chart, or at best render it pretty meaningless?

JS: We’re not happy about that prospect, which is why these negotiations have been going on for a year. But at some point the discussion has to end, doesn’t it?

CTW: So what will you do if no agreement’s been reached by the deadline? [The supposed deadline, the latest of several, at this point was the end of May]

JS: I don’t think it’s ever going to reach that point. It’s been a moving sort of deadline – the first one was December 31^st, so that shows you what kind of deadline it is… I think negotiations will continue to drag on for the forseeable future, and the charts will continue for the forseeable future. As long as they’re making progress I’m happy to keep it going, and hopefully we’ll get a nice resolution. But people are trying to make judgements based on what they’ve read in the press rather than getting together in one room and talking about it. We’re not running out of patience, we haven’t set deadlines, we haven’t issued ultimatums and I’m sure that no-one who was actually in the negotiations would tell you any different.

And once again, that’s how it turned out. So far so peachy, then. The people who stand to lose the most out of the change, however, are the people charged with promoting the games business out there in the real world. As the industry’s demands for government subsidies/tax breaks/whatever grow ever more strident, one of the chief weapons of the lobbyists operating on our behalf is the array of stats which we can wield to show just how much revenue and wealth the industry generates for the UK. Without timely access to that information, isn’t ELSPA’s job going to become near-impossible? Better ask Roger Bennett.

CTW: Well, Roger? Rather pulling the rug out from under your feet, aren’t they?

RB: Our charts are the envy of the world, and anything that diminished them would clearly undermine the interests of our members. And while it’s obvious that publishers wouldn’t want to upset Electronics Boutique [CTW can attest to this – of all the game publishers we spoke to about the issue, none would go on the record, though many were scathing in their private comments], we can’t afford as an industry to take that step backwards.

CTW: It looks like it’s going to happen anyway, though.

RB: The most important thing is that whatever arrangements are made, we maintain the continuity of supply. I hope it all gets sorted out, though - I’m not a great worrier at all, but this whole thing really has kept me awake at nights.