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NPD Sales Results for September 2007
- Thread starter sonycowboy
- Start date
Not to let an epic thread die...
NPD post up this morning at Next-Gen.biz.
I'm the author, but sonycowboy's comments in the past have led me to believe it'd be kosher to link to it.
For whatever it's worth, I don't read the GAF NPD stuff until after I've turned in my work to the editors, so I'll be taking today to go through everyone's comments here.
NPD post up this morning at Next-Gen.biz.
I'm the author, but sonycowboy's comments in the past have led me to believe it'd be kosher to link to it.
For whatever it's worth, I don't read the GAF NPD stuff until after I've turned in my work to the editors, so I'll be taking today to go through everyone's comments here.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
jvm said:
This really deserves its own thread, there's a lot to cover.
And I might add, it's much harder to spin some of the numbers that you've put together. Nicely done.
Opus Angelorum
Member
jvm said:
Fantastic article, very well written.
SouthernDragon
Member
I'll quit the derail here, but the reason I have not bought nor played RE4 is because I don't like horror.
Excellent article.jvm said:
My only suggestion here is to provide the monthly totals for each game.
You nailed this. There's been a lot of discussion here about this point, but this was the best analysis of the Halo 3 impact I've read so far. It moved some hardware, but not a tremendous amount, and we have yet to see if it will continue to do so.
This was the most revealing part of the article, especially the contrast between first party longevity and 3rd party.
Great write-up.
CitizenCope
Member
jvm said:
Your weekly consoles sales chart alone could have shut so many people up in here. Has nice colors.
Good read. Will go back and finish the rest.
Sonycowboy has commented on those figures being "way off".
Did anyone expect those games to have as much longevity in the top 20 as Wii Play and Zelda? Not many games do. As was mentioned in the article, several 360 games (Dead Rising, Lost Planet, Forza 2, Crackdown) fell off the top 20 after two months as well, and those were mentioned as having more longevity than the average big 360 game..GhaleonEB said:
Sho_Nuff82
Member
Jokeropia said:
The difference being, those 360 games had monster first month sales. And in the article, he mentions these as evidence that they were selling only to hardcore fans, in contrast to Guitar Hero 2, which stayed in the top 10/20 for months, selling over a million copies despite debuting at under 300k.
Jokeropia said:
The only data I'd seen on 3rd party sales accross platforms this month came from MS:
So it's nice to have a couple other data points. In the article, I wish we had an apples-apples comparison - how many 3rd party titles hit the top 20 for 360 this year, and how long did they last? That context would help make the data on the Wii more interesting. (If there's one major criticism of the otherwise excellent article, it's that a different kind of analysis is done on each system's data, rather than making them comparable.) Still, the above from MS and the data in the article on 3rd party software sales isn't painting a great 3rd party sales success for the Wii. Hopefully we get more data as the holidays roll through.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
Well honestly, I think Guitar Hero will be the new measuring stick for 3rd party sales across all 3 platforms, since no one seems to want to use Madden.
Great game in a multi-million dollar franchise, all versions have their perks:
360 - achievements, (exclusive?) DLC
PS3 - cheaper wireless Guitars than 360, DLC
Wii - $10 less than 360/PS3, 'superior' Guitar experience due to rumble/mic
It think it will say a lot if the 360 version outsells the PS2 version, or if one of the other two versions is a flop.
Great game in a multi-million dollar franchise, all versions have their perks:
360 - achievements, (exclusive?) DLC
PS3 - cheaper wireless Guitars than 360, DLC
Wii - $10 less than 360/PS3, 'superior' Guitar experience due to rumble/mic
It think it will say a lot if the 360 version outsells the PS2 version, or if one of the other two versions is a flop.
Excellent article. The NPD thread should be locked until Matt make his analysis every month. I'm only half joking.
What on Earth are PSP owners doing with the machines?? They're not buying games or UMDs. Do that many people know how to "cheat" the system?
Nintendo have really fouled up the NPD charts with their Wii Play shenanigans. Is it software or hardware? Nintendo can claim both. Both of my SUPER casual friends who owns Wiis bought it based on their love of Wii Sports and they both hated it, but since they got a controller "for free", they don't complain.
I think that 360 software sales are especially frontloaded not only because of the "hardcore" user base, but because with Live there is "peer pressure" of sorts to keep up with what all of the people on your Friends List are playing. I have 40 so or folks on my Friends List and every month it is lit up with people playing the game du jour. Is this good or bad for the industry? I think total software sales, in dollars, is what counts the most and we don't get to see those numbers very often.
What on Earth are PSP owners doing with the machines?? They're not buying games or UMDs. Do that many people know how to "cheat" the system?
Nintendo have really fouled up the NPD charts with their Wii Play shenanigans. Is it software or hardware? Nintendo can claim both. Both of my SUPER casual friends who owns Wiis bought it based on their love of Wii Sports and they both hated it, but since they got a controller "for free", they don't complain.
I think that 360 software sales are especially frontloaded not only because of the "hardcore" user base, but because with Live there is "peer pressure" of sorts to keep up with what all of the people on your Friends List are playing. I have 40 so or folks on my Friends List and every month it is lit up with people playing the game du jour. Is this good or bad for the industry? I think total software sales, in dollars, is what counts the most and we don't get to see those numbers very often.
BenjaminBirdie
Banned
Sho_Nuff82 said:
Would this be the first peripheral driven third party PS3 game? If those bundles bomb for Activision, o lordy.
dammitmattt
Banned
Sho_Nuff82 said:
Don't forget another huge plus for the 360 version - already have one guitar from GH2
Sho_Nuff82 said:
I think PS3 version will be a relative "flop." But again, what can you do? This comes down to the fact that many PS3 owners are multi-console owners and also the network effects (pun intended I suppose) of Live, the larger base, etc. (e.g., I'm buying it on 360 instead of PS3 because I can play it with my 360-owning friends).
Again, I think this will somewhat unfairly lead to more hyperbolic PS3 doom-and-gloom even though it really won't be indicative of anything we don't already know but I can't say that negativity will be totally unmerited.
dammitmattt
Banned
hoos30 said:
Dude....that is in the very first post of this thread, and the industry is doing TREMENDOUSLY well right now. Why in the world would it be bad for the industry if more people are buying games?!?!?!?
Sharp said:
It won't sell crazy well on PC or PS3, but it will do okay.
I think that's still because of the "hardcore" user base. I don't think that once you get into the "casual" market that those people will want to or be able to keep up with the game buying of the current user base. Following that logic, games will still be crazy front-loaded when the 360 has double the user base, but they won't sell twice as many copies.hoos30 said:
Yeah, pretty much!hoos30 said:Madden was a perfectly suitable measuring stick until the Wii came along.
I think Guitar Hero III will sell well even on the PC and the PS3. At the very least, all the freeware GH applications should prove that the demand is there. But because of the way PC game sales are tracked, GAF won't hear about it.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
AstroLad said:
If multiplatform games can't sell well on PS3, because all PS3 owners are double-dipping 360 owners, HD gaming is fucked, plain and simple.
The PS3 at some point or another is going to have to hold up its end on these 20+ million dollar projects. Sony really has to start selling these machines to some one-console owning casuals.
AstroLad said:
Yup, Sony absolutely positively has to do something to get network effects going. The legendary firmware 2.0 is supposed to hit real soon now, and hopefully they'll make something happen there.
Sony can't just limit things to Home.
Yeah, computing platforms are all about network effects, and Live is a tremendous intensifier of network effects. Sony should be fighting much, much harder on their online service than they have.
We need surprises in the area of a bigger and better PS Store, and the new firmware, along with a fuck-ton of good marketing from Sony this holiday season if they are going to do anything to help their network effects problem.
dammitmattt
Banned
hoos30 said:
Gotcha.....I thought you were referring to the monthly dollar amounts, which sonycowboy is gracious enough to post each month.
Xeke said:
He meant speaker.
Sho_Nuff82 said:hoos30 said:
Madden was a perfectly suitable measuring stick until the Wii came along.
No single game can ever be a yardstick for 3rd party sales in general. Extrapolating that from a single game (or series) is horribly flawed. There were many quality 3rd party games on PS2 that flopped but nobody in their right mind would claim that 3rd party games don't sell on PS2.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
I think what he's asking is not so much "Is everybody buying more games good?" as "Is everybody buying more of the same few games good?", though without a full set of figures to look at it's hard to say whether this is any more true with X360 than other systems.pr0cs said:
That's a very well-written article. Thanks a lot.
The only qualm I have with it is that you suppose that there are some people who are picking up an additional copy of Halo 3 for collecting purposes.
At 3.3 million copies sold, the amount of consumers who did so are (extremely likely) statistically insignificant and thus, completely irrelevant, when it comes to estimating a "true" attach rate. This is especially true since you don't have any evidence to support the claim outside of anecdotal evidence. I would have omitted that.
IMO, the best thing Sony could do this holiday would be to do an agressive marketing campaign targeting the 360 and the difference in features like HD size, wifi, and free online. Show the consumers the value and start marketing those games on TV. They do pretty well with online advertising but they are severely lacking when it comes to a presence in the TV space. Especially considering that almost all of the 3rd party game commercials end with the 360 logo. Marketing, Marketing, Marketing is all they need at this point. Nintendo is selling hardware on marketing. MS is selling a fuck-ton of software on marketing. Sony is doing jack shit.
The only qualm I have with it is that you suppose that there are some people who are picking up an additional copy of Halo 3 for collecting purposes.
At 3.3 million copies sold, the amount of consumers who did so are (extremely likely) statistically insignificant and thus, completely irrelevant, when it comes to estimating a "true" attach rate. This is especially true since you don't have any evidence to support the claim outside of anecdotal evidence. I would have omitted that.
IMO, the best thing Sony could do this holiday would be to do an agressive marketing campaign targeting the 360 and the difference in features like HD size, wifi, and free online. Show the consumers the value and start marketing those games on TV. They do pretty well with online advertising but they are severely lacking when it comes to a presence in the TV space. Especially considering that almost all of the 3rd party game commercials end with the 360 logo. Marketing, Marketing, Marketing is all they need at this point. Nintendo is selling hardware on marketing. MS is selling a fuck-ton of software on marketing. Sony is doing jack shit.
BenjaminBirdie
Banned
tanod said:
I'm almost positive they've considered this at dozens of meetings and concluded that none of those three benefits would have enough of a consumer impact to offset the cost of a campaign focusing on them.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
mepaco said:
If sequels to the best-selling franchises in a given region can't be used to gauge 3rd party sales, what can?
sonycowboy said:
WOW Nintendo sell almost the same than Xbox even if they don't have their bigest games of the year out!!!
xbox: halo3, bioshock
wii: metroid3, mario galaxy, mario & sonic, and next year wii fit, mario kart, and SMASH BRAWL!!!
I have a lot of friends who will buy Wii for mario agalxy, and metroid3!! they are just waiting to earn more money to christmas season! I hope they find it! lol!
JoshuaJSlone
Member
Like he said, no single franchise. Imagine how shitty we'd perceive last gen as doing if we looked at the growth of Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, and Resident Evil.Sho_Nuff82 said:
BenjaminBirdie said:
Well, they can easily show what
Really, anything can become a selling point if a company just markets the shit out of it.
jvm said:
Things that bug me:
Bioshock vs. Metroid comparison you're switching up weekly vs. daily sales numbers. There's no way to compare how big the drop off for Bioshock was after it's first 4 days, but it very well could have been identical to Metroid if not worse. The fact is that Metroid sold more on a daily average than Bioshock did in September, but the comparison blurb makes it sound like Bioshock is doing significantly better.
People are buying multiple copies of Halo 3 to "collect" them? Really?
And this paragraph is a bit of a stretch given the data we have: "This may be simply a function of the type of buyer that Nintendo has courted: the casual gamer. Those buyers may ultimately only purchase 2 or 3 games per year and those games will predominantly be first-party titles, as they are the ones most heavily publicized and recognized by the average consumer. Should this prove to be true, the current trend toward expanding Wii development may prove problematic, as third parties fight for the one non-Nintendo title that each casual owner is willing to buy each year."
Firstly, there's not really much of a real "trend" toward expanding Wii development, and even if we were in fact seeing any results of that yet, perhaps it has more to do with the genres and the quality of the software than just the third party support in general. The biggest third party Wii games this month were Carnival Games and MySims. Convince me they would have sold better on the 360 - or even hit the top 20 for that matter.
Saying that supporting the Wii may prove to be problematic, when they haven't put any real support behind it to begin with is a very poor conclusion to make. Nintendo might in fact have a lock on minigames and such with WiiSports, WiiPlay and Mario Party. How about putting some real effort in to a genre that Nintendo doesn't dominate? RE4 and Red Steel are really the only big titles that I'd say fall in to that category, and both did relatively good.
Lastly - it would have been nice to touch on the Stranglehold bomb - since Midway was really expecting that to do well. Why did it fail?
speculawyer
Member
BuzzJive said:
Yeah, that made no sense to me. Maybe 2 or 3 people do that, but not a number that would be detectable.
As far as irrational Halo 3 purchases go, I'd say there is probably more people who bought Halo 3 despite not owning a xbox 360 yet in anticipation of the new 360 SKUs such as the Forza/Marvel pack and the Arcade pak. But that would also be a pretty small number.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
People do this with anything that there are multiples of. If 2% of H3 purchases were "double dips", then that would visibly affect H3's attach ratio from 49% to 48%.BuzzJive said:
speculawyer
Member
BuzzJive said:
I'm also very curious on that one. How many did it actually end up selling? One excuse is that they delayed the PS3 CE version may have hurt. People like me & others wanted the PS3 CE version since it comes with a HD version of Hard Boiled. But I'd be surprised if people like me make up a substantial number. Perhaps the game just bombed because it got mediocre reviews and it was up against Halo 3.
Ok! :^)BuzzJive said:
You've identified a mistake from the August numbers which carried over into the September numbers. Thank you. I quoted my August article numbers without double checking them, and they were misstated there. I said 40,000 copies a week BioShock in August -- should have been 40,000 per day. I'll send in an amendment to the article.
What? Wii-designed games would have sold better on the Xbox 360? I didn't see that as my point -- rather that that money spent on a game on the Xbox 360 might see a different, perhaps higher, return.
Madden NFL 08 on the Wii did not do well. There's a category that EA has all to itself, and Wii folks shunned it. I'd say Boogie was also a different game on the Wii, with its singing and recording options, but it was also shunned. (Review scores also doomed it, perhaps.) Tiger Woods did slightly better, but is still an area where Nintendo doesn't compete (although Tecmo does, sorta...).
Good question. I've not spent time on it. On a personal level, it doesn't have the widespread appeal that Midway figured it would based on just its leading man and John Woo's weight.
jvm said:
If you put the same amount of effort in to a 360 game as these companies have put in to Wii games - well - they'd have to give them away at Burger King instead of charging $50.
jvm said:
Madden's failure is a bit of a shame - but blame shouldn't fall squarely on Wii owners. It was the worst reviewed version, and EA didn't advertise the features of the Wii version at all. It still sold better than the Gamecube versions (baby steps) and sold relatively well during it's second month (if the leaked numbers from several pages back were accurate).
Boogie is a pretty bad game. I know. I own it. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
Tiger Woods 07 sold great for such a late version. Tiger Woods 08 for all platforms seems to have fallen flat. Tiger playing with a Wii controller was pretty good advertising though and maybe Madden Wii would have sold better if there was some of that going on.
I just don't think there's been enough effort put forth by any third parties to effectively conclude that their effort is not worth it. It's a chicken and egg thing.
If it is true that Wii casuals will buy only a handful of games a year (and I realize this isn't accepted by everyone -- let's discuss it anyway) then the Wii could have a dozen great games in a year and except for the Nintendo ones, the others would sell poorly. So it's not really an issue of finding those areas that Nintendo isn't covering if the audience isn't going to buy that much software to start with.BuzzJive said:
Hopefully the picture will get clearer as time goes on. Did sonycowboy come out with those attach rates yet?
I guess I never thought about how many games I buy per year. I can buy as much in a month sometimes as some people buy in a year. Much of that, however, is used and discounted games. I only buy about 4-5 new releases in a given year.
Masta_Killah
Member
hoos30 said:
QFMFT! I would have never bought games like Lost Planet, Orange Box, Condemned, and a shit load of other games if it wasn't for the XBL community. I regularly get text messages on Live asking if X game is good or not. I got one for Blue Dragon a few weeks ago and I recieved another one from a new 360 user and gaf member for Orange Box. I even have my mostly casual friends picking up games they would have never picked up because I was hyping the game up like there was no tomorrow. I even got one of my hardcore WoW friends to actually stop playing WoW, sell all his characters, and get a 360. He is now a hardcore (though he sucks ass) Halo and RS:V player and he can't wait to play CoD4. My other friend has expanded his taste in games. He no longer just plays Madden or FIFA and picks up games that we can play over Live.
jvm said:
Let's go with another assumption. A lot of the PS2 casuals will become Wii casuals this generation, if for no other reason than they can't justify $400 on a video game console. Did those PS2 casuals not buy games either? Maybe you think the percentage of casuals on the Wii is greater than the percentage of casuals on the PS2?
I very much disagree with the concept of a large percentage of owners for the Wii that will forever only buy 2-3 games per year. They may only spend $200 a year on videogames, but as Greatest Hits showed with the PS2, budget re-releases can light up the charts. A casual with a $200 video game budget per year can buy 2 full priced games and 5 budget re-releases per year with that.
The Wii will not be the PS2 in terms of software. No system is likely to ever be that large a seller of software in the U.S. again, 360 whole-heartedly included. That doesn't mean that Wii failing to be = PS2 in software makes Wii a poor software choice for third-parties. Third-parties just have to be more selective about what they put where (that goes for Wii and 360) instead of funneling almost everything to one system like with the PS2.