SELL pay GfK nearly €1m annually for French sales figures

Jean-Claude Larue, the general delegate of French industry association SELL explains why SELL doesn't publish figures with it's French charts (Google translation);

EL: The GFK SELL and provide a weekly hit parade of games and consoles but no exact figure sale is ever given in France in contrast to other countries. This lack, then why?

- J-CL: Figures are paying dearly. The contract between SELL and GFK already cost nearly one million euros per year. And these data belong to secrecy. It is not nothing to have 2,000 stores visited regularly each week and have the sales to the nearest unit provided by a large international institute GFK as no one denies. That'sa lot of money. It did not give it to people who do not want to pay. When you look at the top of the books we do not say the number of copies sold. Every week we publish on the site SELL the top 5 PC games and consoles, in order. One does not simply quantity. We give general figures twice a year. In IDEF, our trade show in Cannes in June, and towards the end of the year.

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Looks like we're stuck with semi-annual software figures for only the top selling titles for the time being. Fortunately the manufacturers seem happy to supply us with GfK hardware figures more often than every six months.