November
13
Guitar Hero World Tour drops 61% from Guitar Hero III, and other October sales news
The videogame biz is definitely losing a bit of its mojo.
The best evidence? New NPD data shows that Guitar Hero: World Tour has sold 534,000 units in its first week. Pretty good. But consider that last year, "Guitar Hero III" sold 1.4 million units in the exact same period. That's a drop of 62%.
Overall, the industry grew by 18% in October. Again, that's impressive, especially compared to the rest of the media sector and the overall economy. But last October, it grew an astounding 73%. Perhaps most importantly, October's 18% grown was actually less than the 25% year-to-date growth, meaning the hugely important fall season is so far dragging down the industry, rather than accelerating it.
Nintendo, however, remains the ultimate exception. It sold 803,000 Wi''s in October, which is simply astounding. It's the biggest month since last November and December for Nintendo's console and is more than the 360 and PS3 combined. Sony's console, meanwhile, was the only next gen console to see sales drop from September, indicating that "LittleBigPlanet" was definitely not a console seller. That's definitely not a great sign for Sony, or for the movie studios hoping that more PS3's will lead to more Blu-ray sales.
The month's biggest game was "Fable II," good news for Microsoft and also, I'll admit, people like me who loved the game (though it's even more reason to not let everyone in the world annoy me by completely opening the co-op mode). On software too, though, the biggest story was Nintendo. "Wii Fit," "Mario Kart Wii" and "Wii Play" were the no. 2, 4 and 5 titles for the month. Considering that they came out in May, April, and last February, respectively, that's astounding (even discouting "Wii Play" since people buy that for the controller). "Wii Fit" has sold more than 2.8 million units in the U.S. so far, a pretty amazing figure.
On the other hand, "Wii Music" didn't make the top 10 in its launch date. Given how inaccessible and quite frankly annoying the game is (read the review) I'm not too surprised.
In other game debuts, "Fallout 3" did very well with just one week on sale, "Saints Row 2," "SOCOM," and "LittleBigPlant" did pretty well, and "Dead Space" wasn't as hot as I'm sure EA was hoping.
Here are all the month's stats:
Game Console Publisher Units sold in Oct.
Fable II 360 Microsoft 790,000
Wii Fit Wii Nintendo 487,000
Fallout 3 360 Bethesda 375,000
Mario Kart Wii Nintendo 290,000
Wii Play Wii Nintendo 282,000
Saints Row 2 360 THQ 270,000
SOCOM PS3 Sony 231,000
LittleBigPlanet PS3 Sony 215,000
NBA 2K9 360 2K 202,000
Dead Space 360 EA 193,000
Console Oct. unit sales Lifetime-to-date
Wii 803,000 13.5 million
DS 491,000 23.0 million
360 371,000 11.7 million
PSP 193,000 12.8 million
PS3 190,000 5.7 million
Category Oct. revenue Change Year-to-date revenue Change
Total industry $1.31 billion 18% $13.13 billion 25%
Hardware $495 million 5% $4.72 billion 14%
Software $697 million 35% $6.76 billion 36%
Accessories $120 million -8% $1.65 billion 18%
Chris Morris reports on the business and culture of video games and offers analysis of recent events and industry trends.
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I appreciate the comments, guys, but my point was comparing "On Tour" to "Guitar Hero III" and that still holds. Furthermore, gross revenue is a highly misleading figure. Sure, "World Tour" generated a lot of revenue, but that's because it costs three times as much as the average game. And it costs Activision a lot more to make. It's possible the profit margin on the full band kit is higher than for typical games and even "Guitar Hero III," but there's no way that selling less than half as many copies of this year's "Guitar Hero" as last year is a good thing.
Posted by: Ben Fritz | November 17, 2008 at 07:40 PM
Okay, so I feel vindicated.
From Gamespot:
Now, the release of the raw October NPD data allows for the tabulation of the two games' total sales. Unsurprisingly, Guitar Hero World Tour, available on four consoles, was the winner with just more than 534,000 units sold for the month. The most popular platform was the Xbox 360 (191,049 units), followed by the Wii (182,845), PlayStation 3 (96,657), and PlayStation 2 (63,462). Overall, the game generated $67.3 million in sales during the month.
So if total software sales for the month were $697 million, then this indicates that nearly 10 percent of the entire dollar sales for the month were for On Tour.
Again, I think the original article here was extremely misleading.
Posted by: Jay tate | November 17, 2008 at 10:13 AM
From Game Biz:
October was a pretty impressive month for the video game industry considering the overall economic environment in the U.S. Although neither Guitar Hero nor Rock Band made it into the NPD's top 10 selling games for the month, the two popular music franchises still helped boost sales overall. Guitar Hero World Tour placed 11th, 12th and 20th on the Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3, respectively, while Rock Band 2 for PS3 placed 16th.
What's more interesting, however, is a direct dollar sales comparison. According to data provided by Deutsche Bank Securities, Activision's Guitar Hero easily outsold MTV's Rock Band 2 (distributed by EA). Sales for Guitar Hero totaled $67 million for the month of October compared to just $27 million for Rock Band 2.
Deutsche Bank's Jeetil Patel further explained, "While Guitar Hero included incremental platforms, such as the DS and the Nintendo Wii, even on an apples-to-apples comparison on just the PS3 and X360 platforms, sales of Guitar Hero still surpassed Rock Band with $38mn in sales for just the two platforms. ASPs [average selling prices] on Guitar Hero World Tour was also better, at $126 (all-in) and $133 (just X360 and PS3), while RB2 was at $112."
To date, Rock Band 2, which first released in September on Xbox 360, has sold 600K units in the U.S. Guitar Hero World Tour, which released at the end of October, has already sold 534K units.
Posted by: byron Tauser | November 17, 2008 at 09:44 AM
I think the biggest reason for this drop in sales for Guitar Hero World Tour vs Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is the strong competition from Rock Band 2. Instead of going to the store and dropping their allowance on the latest Guitar Hero game, they are now asking "Which game is better?" and naturally some of these people are spending their money on Rock Band 2.
Posted by: Ash | November 14, 2008 at 12:13 PM
I think the biggest reason for this drop in sales for Guitar Hero World Tour vs Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is the strong competition from Rock Band 2. Instead of going to the store and dropping their allowance on the latest Guitar Hero game, they are now asking "Which game is better?" and naturally some of these people are spending their money on Rock Band 2.
Posted by: Ash | November 14, 2008 at 12:13 PM
This article is a bit misleading.
The average selling cost for World Tour was $126. What was the average selling cost of the GH3 units? If you're dealing with bundles you guys need to compare apples to apples.
And what you really need to do is breakout this stuff by the release date. It makes little sense to compare one game which was released for a week to another which was released for 3 weeks. Show launch dates when you're putting out figures.
Finally, 18% growth is awesome. Don't downplay it. The 73% during the previous October was a complete fluke and not indicative of a typical October.
Sorry, but it seems like you guys are trying to make a bigger deal out of this than really exists. Next time let's seem some analysis relating to trends for the holidays based on these numbers - that would actually take some thought.
Posted by: Jay tate | November 14, 2008 at 11:07 AM