"I had no idea this would be so ill-received," said Riley. "Honestly, I know this sounds ignorant but I really was taken aback when I started hearing/reading about this. It was unexpected."

As for why the firm decided on this course of action, Riley was adamant that it is not because of pressure from console makers. "There was no push back [from Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony]," he explained. "However, it's been a year [since we started publicly releasing the data], so we decided to pull this monthly feed and leave it up to the [manufacturer] as to whether or not they wanted that sales information released to media."

Original Story: Beginning this month, the sale-tracking NPD Group will, at least temporarily, become more selective with the numbers it releases to the public, claims Newsweek correspondent N'Gai Croal.

According to Croal, the marketing research firm will no longer supply the media and general public with monthly figures of hardware sales, and will only list the five best-selling games of the month instead of the usual ten. Updates on hardware sales and the ten best-selling games will instead be released quarterly and annually.

However, console manufacturers will obviously still receive the monthly figures and will be free to release the numbers at their own discretion.

Though Croal does not delve too deep into the reasons behind the NPD's decision, it is not too surprising to see the company restricting the distribution of the data it provides to paying clients. It is also difficult to imagine that Sony was pleased when the public learned of the Game Boy Advance repeatedly outselling the PlayStation 3.

Across the past year, the firm has become much more involved in preventing the whole of its work from leaking onto message boards, where the release of new numbers is celebrated and spawns countless feuds about the state of the industry, often marked by the phrase "bitter tears."