Well, the NPD leak from last year was from a user who in the past was a very reliable source for hard data before NPD stopped disclosing it (people who subscribe to NPD/Circana still get the hard data IIRC, but prob risk their membership in publicly sharing it, hence why I'm not naming the person the leak last year supposedly came from). Honestly I don't think there was any other reason for the leak besides giving hard proof of how well these systems were actually doing in the US market, after MS were boasting about performance in early 2022 but then went silent.
It's possible that was also put out there to help MS make a case to regulators for buying ABK by showing how bad their market share was, but I don't think that really made much of a difference one way or another, if it was in fact a motivation. I was just happy the data was leaked because myself and a few others at the time were trying to figure things out like actual sales of Xbox Series and Game Pass revenue, so third-party sources/trackers were the only means of doing that alongside leaks from MS's own documents submitted to the courts & regulatory bodies like the CADE. Then doing stuff beyond that like finding sub counts for ESO, F'76 and other games, sub amounts for XBL Gold (all of this would have factored into things like the $2.9 billion revenue for gaming services reported to CADE, when fanboys were just trying to say that was all Game Pass revenue, for example).
The NPD leak also gave validation to theories like why MS didn't report Xbox sales pacing in their Q3 FY ' 22 investor call, as yet another example, or why they weren't giving updates on Game Pass sub counts or revenues. The only reason they're even reported the 41 million Game Pass number now is because they converted some 15 million XBL Gold subs to Game Pass Core, and that was a lot more recent.
