Wholly lacking in any details...why even bother reading such a lame-arse and lazy article, let alone linking it...?
What figures?
Why are they in dispute?
Needs moar cowbell!

To rub it into lacoo's face before he edits the post:
Valve joins Impulse and gamer's gate with criticism of NPD's didital sales figures. They question the numbers because Valve did not provide any information to NPD in regards of Steam
Please read more here:
http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/08/18/valve-on-npd-groups-recent-pc-digital-download-report/

It really is annoying how some people just mirror every link they see in IRC/Twitter/Email/Their RSS Feed Reader and don't provide any context whatsoever.

Seconded. I'd far rather see posters spend 5-10 minutes putting together a tl;dr version and an opinion than slapping the link on with no context.

And still the article is "he said, she said, blah, blah, nothing of substance here, blah"...
Who are NPD, and why do we care about what figments they publish?
Would be nice for that article to actually link to the subject they're reporting...but that would be too much like real work, I guess :\

Well, actually, the very last sentence of the article IS pretty useful.
It finally says that the NPD just used customer surveys and the like. So, assuming they actually got a good sample (pretty difficult), I think we can still view this as accurate, if not precise.

NPD is a market research firm that tracks things like video game sales and consumer trends (among many other things). Retailers and manufacturers (or in the case of video games, publishers) use NPD's research to make projections on sales and plan their inventory for upcoming seasons. Video game news media uses NPD's research to fuel things like the "console wars". They are actually a very integral part of the retail sector and have been for over 40 years. What NPD reports can make or break entire sectors of the industry, hence all the brouhaha about their recent report on digital download sales being nearly equal to physical media sales.

I don't even bother going to links that are posted without context anymore.
Lackoo, if all you're going to do is post a link with no comment, could you at least mention that in your title? With something such as "LT", "Link only", etc.?
Then those of us who don't want to open a topic only containing a link know to give it a miss. Thanks.

OK.

Thanks.
So basically, a report using limited sources of information, that the objects of the research are poo-pooing because they had no input in it....makes more sense now. Still, that article is severely lacking in detail...let alone the actual report its talking about.
Or just a précis of the substance would do wonders : "we used 4 surveys each referencing 25,000 unique respondents from 15 countries to formulate this research data."
or something :P

I'm still annoyed with DD services' refusals to give out sales numbers, which only lead me to believe that their numbers pale in comparison to retail sales.

i'm curious about GOG's sale number

CD Projekt's basic gross numbers WILL be available in their financials...they have to disclose their grosses and nets as part of a public company. Dunno if it will be broken down in to the different divisions, though.