Highly Anticipated Titles Boost Video Game Sales
The video game industry has suffered significant losses though the course of 2009. Game consoles and video game titles have seen a fall in sales since last year’s financial crisis. From January to October this year, there has been a major decline in video game sales. For this month and the next, however, forecast says video game sales is about to spring back thanks to some famous titles.
Independent marketing research group NPD stated that console sales for last month fell down to 23% and video game titles sales went down 18%. Slashed price tags for the PS3 and XBOX-360 helped a bit, but not enough to boost the total video game hardware sales. An estimated forecast states that a total of $20bn to $21bn will be generated this year compared to last year’s $21.3bn.
The slump in sales have caused numerous job-losses and have been felt by employees from a number of video game developers and vendors some of which are Electronic Arts and Gamestop. Gamestop said they are anticipating a decline in sales of up to 11% and has also been removed from Goldman Sachs’ conviction buy list and EA declared it will have to let go 1,500 of their employees but the matter of when remains to be seen.
Sales among the three gaming consoles have been changing due to competitive price reduction and exclusivity of highly anticipated game titles. Sony’s Playstation 3 has reported a rise in sales in Japan and Europe due to the $100 price cut Sony had issued and they are optimistic on next year’s sale with the release of God of War III. On the downside, their PSPGo has not seen any considerable boost in sales since its release last October 2009 in the US.
More optimism has surfaced as Activision launched their highly anticipated “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” sequel to the successful “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.” Other upcoming titles are also likely to boost title sales for the month of November with Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed 2” and Wii’s “New Super Mario Bros.”
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has given Activision its record sales for 2009 with an estimated $310 million from the United Kingdom and North America. Activision reported that they sold about 4.7 million copies for within only 24 hours after its first release date.
Call of Duty MW2 is expected to overtake the success of Grand Theft Auto IV by Take Two Interactive where it sold 3.6 million copies worldwide, much less than the figure of CoD:MW2 copies sold in just the US and the UK. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has a price tag of $60 or £36.55.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 puts players in real-life combat of today’s modern time and players can elect to play in single player or multiplayer mode online. It is available on ether PC Windows, Playstation 3 and XBOX 360.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 5:32 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.