Overview
- Reports published Thursday show Circana confirmed Xbox (Microsoft) and EA are no longer on its U.S. digital-data sharing panel, which supplied direct storefront sales to the firm.
- With those publishers gone, Circana has begun using estimated or predicted digital figures for affected games, which raises margins of error for its monthly software charts.
- The loss removes a primary source of sales truth for Xbox first-party and Activision/Bethesda titles and makes it harder to verify third-party performance when publishers do not share their own data.
- Push Square and other outlets say Microsoft may also have stopped sharing with European tracker GSD but that point remains less fully confirmed by official sources.
- Industry trends such as PlayStation's planned end of disc production in 2028 mean physical retail data will shrink over time, leaving analysts and the public more dependent on publishers and platforms to disclose digital sales.