May 3rd, 2009 by Griffin McElroy
Compared to last Spring’s outlandish software sales figures (fueled by the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and GTA IV), this year’s stats aren’t inspiring much confidence in gaming industry investors. In fact, many are anxiously awaiting the launch of new hardware to provide a quick sales boost — but according to industry analyst Michael Pachter, they shouldn’t hold their breath: By his estimation, new hardware won’t be hitting store shelves until at least 2013.
Pachter said that publishers would be hesitant to adopt new hardware considering their investments in the current console cycle have yet to adequately pay off. There’s one exception — Pachter expects the oft-rumored high-definition Wii may appear some time in 2010.
Analyst: Next console cycle isn’t coming until 2013 originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 02 May 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted in , Hardware, sales, pachter, console-cycle, hd, spring | No Comments »
May 1st, 2009 by Griffin McElroy
In the past, Peter Moore has hinted at the tenuous relationship between the company he helms (EA Sports) and Nintendo’s three-DVD-wide home console (the Wii). Yesterday, the leader of the highly athletic development studio fully acknowledged EA Sports’ lackluster sales performance on the Wii in an interview with Eurogamer, stating, “when I look at the attach rate on the Wii of our software to where I think we should be, we’re under-performing still, we need to do much better.”
Moore is hoping to claim a few extra slices of that sweet Wii pie with the studio’s upcoming MotionPlus-infused sports titles, Tiger Woods 10 and Grand Slam Tennis. Of course, we can’t have a story about Mr. Moore without one of his trademarked Awesomely Ostentatious Quotes: “Those two titles couldn’t come at a better time for us, nor for Nintendo quite frankly.” Oh, yeah. That one’s going up on the fridge.
Peter Moore says EA Sports is ‘under-performing’ on the Wii originally appeared on Joystiq Nintendo on Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted in , EA, sales, motionplus, ea-sports, grand-slam-tennis, peter-moore, tiger-woods-10 | No Comments »
October 24th, 2008 by David Hinkle
Filed under: News
Analysts think that due to the continuing decline of the U.S. dollar and the 13-year high for the Japanese Yen, you won’t be seeing too many hot deals on Nintendo’s Wii this holiday season. With the Yen being so high, it drives up the cost of Japanese goods for U.S. retailers. And, seeing as how the U.S. economy has been in such bad shape all year, merchants have discounted their goods to offset that fall to a point where they can’t afford to lower prices to attract customers any more.
Wii Fit, one of the items analysts see as being a must-have this season, could be most affected. With the profit margin on it so small (same goes for the Wii console itself), retailers can’t afford to cut prices. One positive thing to come out of this, however, is that the Euro has been on a decline, as well. This means that Nintendo should be shipping more to the U.S., whereas in the past, Nintendo focused on Europe first.
Posted in , dollar, Business, japan, Europe, holidays, sales, wii-fit, salesfigures, holiday, north-america, euro, yen | No Comments »
May 21st, 2008 by Chris Greenhough
Filed under: News
Poor old Ubisoft. Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that casual games won’t pay for your entire HQ to be paved in gold. According to Ubisoft North American president Laurent Detoc, this is because any savings made on developing such titles goes towards marketing the things, which apparently costs an arm and a leg.
“The margins on these games are good when you look at development, but it takes a lot of marketing dollars,” revealed Detoc to Gamasutra, instantly endearing himself to all of us hardcore gamers who can’t stand a lot of the casual tat on the Wii. “It’s like packaged goods. You have to think about marketing, retail space, branding.” My, isn’t it nice to see that the creative flame still burns bright in the industry?
Anyway, Ubisoft is especially struggling with its Wii line-up of casual fare, with Detoc admitting that much work is to be done if Ubi’s games are to “sell as well as Nintendo’s own Wii titles.” Needless to say, our hearts bleed.
Posted in , Business, ubisoft, sales, casual, catz, dogz, horsez, laurent-detoc, petz | No Comments »
November 29th, 2007 by astrotriforce
The days they are a-changin’. It looks like Metal Gear Solid 4 will have to sell over 1 million copies on it’s first day(!) in order for Konami to make back the sky high development costs of the sure-to-be system-seller. This is all due to it only being available on one platform, the Playstation 3.
It used to be that video game developers could bank on a system exclusive to ramp up sales numbers for that title, but no longer. In this day and age it can take years and millions upon millions of dollars with huge development teams just to pump out one “next-gen” quality video game title (particularly on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360), and a new Reuters article explores whether or not Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots may indeed be the last great console exclusive (although maybe they are forgetting about a little game called Final Fantasy XIII).
As has been widely reported, virtually all Sony’s once-exclusive juggernauts like Devil May Cry 4, Virtua Fighter 5, Grand Theft Auto 4, Assassin’s Creed, and Mercenaries 2 have gone multiplatform with all of them releasing on Microsoft’s competing console as well as Sony’s.
“We understand publishers are needing to recoup their investment,” said Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing for Sony. “From our perspective, as long as the games aren’t going exclusive to other platforms, PS3 gamers are not actually losing anything.”
To compete Sony has majorly ramped up production with it’s own internal studios and is now creating no less than 15 Playstation titles, which is more than Microsoft and Nintendo combined (according to them anyway) with 15 exclusives hitting the PS3 between September 2007 and April 2008.
And now 3rd parties are needed to move massive amounts of copies in the first DAY just to stay afloat.
Which is a high order for Metal Gear Solid 4 considering that PS3 sales have been sluggish when compared to the Xbox 360 (7.2 million units sold) and Wii (5.2 million sold). The PS3 has sold only 2 million to this point according to NPD research and a year after it’s release only two PS3 titles have reached the one million mark in sales
So with production costs being anywhere from $10 to $50 million for top titles, that means publishers are virtually required to go multiplatform to make back all that money spent.
“You might be able to weather one title coming in at 500,000 in sales,” said Pidgeon. “But two or three failures like that and even big publishers are going to be hurting.”
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Posted in , xbox 360, playstation 3, PS3, News, game, videogame, konami, sales, metal gear solid 4, mgs4, game sales, sell million, one day | No Comments »
November 26th, 2007 by supadupagama
Sony Computer Entertainment (SCEI) today announced that the sales of its new PSP slim and lite has reached a total of 1 million units in Japan as of November 22, 2007. This remarkable milestone was achieved in only 2 months from its launch on September 20, and tracking 2 weeks faster in pace than the original PSP launched in December 2004.
While there’s no motion of worldwide sales of this PSP 2000, the Japanese PR mentions that: “The new slim and light PSP offers more convenience in portability and more choice in colors to match users’ lifestyle. The newly added ‘1 Seg’ TV viewing feature on its 4.3 inch high resolution LCD screen, an overwhelmingly large screen for a handheld device, has also become the driver in attracting more and a broader range of users. Strong sales still continues after 2 months from launch, underpinning the acceleration of the expansion of the PSP platform.”
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Posted in , PSP, News, sales, light, slim, underpinning, portability, convenience, overwhelmingly, attracting | No Comments »
November 21st, 2007 by Candace Savino
Filed under: News
Super Mario Galaxy's initial sales in Japan may have been
a little disappointing, but that's not the case in the U.S. The game has sold 500,000 copies in its first week, which isn't too shabby of a debut for the portly plumber's newest escapade. Sure, the U.S. has a larger install base than Japan, meaning that the game
should sell more, but even when put into context the U.S. sales for
Super Mario Galaxy don't disappoint.
According to George Harrison, NoA's senior vice president of marketing,
Galaxy is both the fastest selling Wii and Mario game in the U.S. to-date. Furthermore, with the
excellent reviews that the game has been receiving, it's not hard to believe that the game will sell even more for the holidays.
We'll have to wait until February to see if
Super Smash Bros. Brawl can dethrone
Galaxy as the Wii's first week sales champ, but we certainly wouldn't be surprised (or upset) if it does. Even so, we decided to put a little Mario tribute video after the break.
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November 21st, 2007 by David Hinkle
Filed under: News
With
Black Friday just around the corner, you're likely doing some last minute sharpening of all your swords and battle testing your armor against your little brother. It's going to be crazy out there as you try to procure a Wii for your loved one or, even worse, yourself. We feel for you.
But, odds aren't looking that good. Considering that the Wii was the gift to have last year, as well, this year isn't looking any better. Retailers are having trouble keeping the console on shelves and Nintendo is having trouble making enough for those shelves. It's a unique situation, in that popular holiday gifts often change from year to year, but the Wii looks like it has the staying power.
What's your plan of action for procuring a Wii this holiday season? Do you have any friends or family trying to get their hands on one?
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Posted in , holidays, sales, black-friday | No Comments »
November 20th, 2007 by David Hinkle
Filed under: News
We apologize for the lack of quality in the above image, but when you take into account the news it brings, the image doesn't really matter. See, if you're the brave type to go out and about on Black Friday, then you might want to hit up your local Circuit City, where
Super Mario Galaxy will be available for the discounted price of $34.99.
Anyone plan on picking up a copy on the cheap? Maybe as a gift for a friend or loved one this holiday season? Or, maybe you haven't had the dough to get it yourself yet?
[Thanks to everyone that sent this in!]
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November 20th, 2007 by David Hinkle
Filed under: Virtual Console, Features, Meta
With
this week being dedicated to the first birthday of our most favorite thing on this planet, the Wii, we looked at every possible aspect of the console we wanted to discuss. All of our launch day stories, its first year when compared to the GameCube and, last but not least, Nintendo's first foray into the downloadable content arena. And, as many of you faithful readers know, we
love checking out what the service has for download every Monday.
As responsible bloggers, we do our best to play the releases every week and let you know what we think. In doing this, we've run up quite the tab with Nintendo, as we've only missed a few weeks of covering the games. Considering the average weekly release of games will set you back about $21, we calculated that the amount of money we've spent on Virtual Console games is more than we could've ever imagined.
Sadly, we can't measure the full year, as we've only been downloading every game to discuss since near the end of February. So, that's about 4 months of not downloading games, which brings us to about 40 weeks of downloads. With the average cost for us to do so each week is $21 and change (as we've said above), we've spent about $840 total on Virtual Console games.
We look forward to this upcoming year, to get a full year's catalog of releases under our belt. And, what about you folks? On average, how much do you think you spend a week? How much do you think you've spent since the service's debut?
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