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NPD March 2011 Sales Results [Update 2: Super Street Fighter IV 3D]
- Thread starter EviLore
- Start date
Sho_Nuff82
Member
jvm said:Yes, I was able to obtain some figures directly from NPD for my article. But let me simply put this out there straight: I know y'all want the PS3 figure, and I wish it were public. Regrettably, I can't help.I don't want people to get their hopes up over that one.
If enough analysts write something to the tune of "PS3 is doing so bad, that Sony stopped giving sales numbers", Sony will be forced to give them again to prove that wrong...
So we´re counting on you.
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
Agreed. I think Nintendo would've been better served saving the game for the fall/holidays (alongside Mario Kart, Kid Icarus, Animal Crossing) and bumping one or both of their N64 remakes for launch.A Human Becoming said:
Sho_Nuff82
Member
Dance In My Blood said:
Just saying it's very likely that Crysis 2's debut 10 days moved 3-6x as many full priced retail sales as Crysis' first two weeks.
It's still showing impressive legs in Europe, it might chart again next month in the US depending on recent releases.
Mortal Kombat
Pokemon
Call of Duty
Portal 2
Zumba Fitness
SOCOM 4
Lego Star Wars 3
NBA 2k11
are probably all locks for the top 10, Crysis might just sneak in again.
charlequin
Banned
lawblob said:
Right.
The particularly stupid thing here is that Nintendo does still have the ability to offer software that they can guarantee will sell (and be perceived as worth the price) at $40. Mario for 3DS will sell at $40. Mario Kart for 3DS will sell at $40. Stuff like Animal Crossing will probably sell at least fine at $40.
The 3DS is a perfect opportunity for Nintendo to remember about price discrimination and maximize their revenue by selling games at the right price -- their system can support a $20 retail Pilotwings and a $5 DD submarine game and a $40 AAA Mario title. They just need to not be so fucking stubborn about it.
Plinko said:
This has never been a problem for any other system in history, names be damned. Talk to people in games retail and you'll hear stories from every generational transition about clueless parents who couldn't tell Gameboy from Gameboy Advance or Xbox from Xbox 360.
The fundamental problem is the software. If there were a single game everyone really wanted, that'd solve the issue right there: people would ask about it, they'd find out it's for a new system, and there you go. Market confusion of this type can only persist when people have no actual reason to investigate, and in this case that's a result of no compelling software titles to force people to engage with the existence of a new system.
TheUnknownForce said:
Well, first off, $4 on iOS is $2.80 in revenue for the developer; you'd need to charge $9.33 to get the same revenue per sale on XBLA.
Secondly, these games are definitely more slight overall than you'd generally see on XBLA: Glyder has much less visual polish, has much more "supplemental" content than something like Pilotwings but fundamentally only has the one mode (Birdman) rather than a few gameplay styles, etc.
Thirdly, yes, there is a deflationary effect on iOS because of the way the App Store is setup: it discourages higher-price apps and competitively drives most titles down to a price level that somewhat devalues their content -- but we're talking about a game selling for $2 that should be $6 or for $4 that should be $10 here, not a game selling for $2 that should be $40.
With Pilotwings in particular, it might be hard to make a game that justifies $40 simply because the entire concept is somewhat niche, but it would be trivial to make a game that justified $20 -- multiple locations, more modes, achievements and leaderboards, local multiplayer, unlocks, advancement, etc. That just isn't the game Nintendo delivered -- they took a game that would be a great $5-10 showpiece on their 3DSWare service and tried (unsuccessfully) to gussy it up into a $40 retail title.
I'd call Iwata's comments at GDC ignorant coming from most people, but he's smart enough that I have to call them disingenuous instead. Iwata knows very well that different software isn't going to sell effectively or be properly priced for everyone at the exact same level, but he's bought into a (fundamentally wrong-headed) idea that he can maximize profit through what's basically extortionist pricing and he has to peddle the corporate line in support of that strategy when he talks in public.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
TheUnknownForce said:
It might be a two way problem for companies, but it's a one way problem for me.
I'm done paying what they want. If I set a rule saying I will literally never pay more than $10 for a game, I not only will still have more than enough games to play for the rest of my life if I game for 20 hours a week, but I'm also supremely confident that I won't miss out on anything much*
* Should note that I don't play many multiplayer shooters so games are a tad less time-critical than some of the people on GAF. But I still play everything within a year of release or so.
It's not just iOS. It's Steam. And used games. And retail sales. And eBay. And Amazon. And ridiculous trade-in credit flip-for-a-profit schemes. And free MS points out the wazoo. And Asian copies of region-free games. And the fact that since Netflix, I don't need to buy TV shows or movies. And the fact that there are probably fewer than a dozen genuinely rare games this generation released in North America and even the rarest ones have rarely exceeded original MSRP. And the fact that like everyone else who plays games regularly and doesn't sawblade their games into Gamestop every week, I've got a massive backlog. And for Americans you can add Hulu and Amazon Prime onto this list.
Note here that I'm not arguing that games aren't worth full price, I'm arguing that there are so many factors counting AGAINST the value of games that whether or not they are worth full price, you're still crazy to pay it. Pilotwings just sold for $26. $26. Less than a month after release on a launch title! It has sold for as low as $22.50!
For what it's worth, this month I spent $29.99 on games. It's the least I've spent on games in a single month in at least 4 or 5 years. I'd have to go back and check, but I suspect my YOY expenditures have been down every single month for the last year.
I hate used, but even then, they're missing out on a bunch of sales of people who buy used or wait for titles to go to a greatest hits line or whatnot. Even worse that in Aus it's still launch RRP (MSRP) and you can buy 5 brand new fairly good budget PSP titles for the price of 1 M64DS (or other 1st party titles). Or 2/3 high rated 360/PS3 games. Same pretty much applies to Wii as well. Can't imagine many people buying full price Twilight Princess anymoreStumpokapow said:
This only has a chance of working if it's true. And maybe it isn't, you know? And whether it's true or not, I believe Sony could ask the NPD Group why they're helping me at all. And if I'm not living up to my end of the agreement I have with the NPD Group, then that's a really good question, no?Hammer24 said:
Stumpokapow said:
It's kind of like you are making a couple different arguments here. Are you really arguing against the amount of content available in games or are you just finally realizing "hey, I have a lot of other, cheaper ways to spend my time?"
I'm as much of a fan of used games as anyone and I buy a decent amount of them. But sometimes when a game comes out I wanna play it. Why go see a movie on release night for 12 bucks with a 5 dollar soda when I could wait for it to make its run in the dollar theaters or just see it on television? Well, cause I wanna see it now.
Yes, we live in a modern digital age where thousands of companies fight for our time with increasingly cheap or free games. I could pay fifteen bucks a month for World of Warcraft and play it forever and beat your game expenditure by half. Hell, I could never pay a thing for any game ever again, and play only free flash games on the Internet, junk on Facebook, and those "pay what you want" PC indie game bundles until the end of time. But games to me are not just A Commodity, to be consumed like a 30 pound bag of cat food "oh I'm good on my games supply right now." Sometimes I want what I want, and I'm willing to pay to support that hobby and the industry that surrounds it. Sometimes I enjoy one game more than another. Just as there are no shortage of games, there are also no shortage of videos, screenshots, message boards, and websites to help a buyer make an educated guess about whether he will or will not enjoy what he's about to buy.
It's also not all about "the kind of game" but what is in the game itself. There are probably dozens of clones of the kinds of games I want (Gameloft exists almost solely for this purpose). But there are a lot of games I like because of the design philosophy, because of the content, because of the style. Maybe I want to play on Wuhu Island with the rocketpack like I remember from my old Pilotwings days! Sometimes you don't just want "some breakfast cereal" but you want Froot Loops.
As an enthusiast of a hobby, sometimes I'll pay full price for a game when it comes out, cause I want it. Again, there's much less of a gap between say the $27.50 three-week-later secondhand price and $39.99 to someone who wants the thing that is being sold.
Have not cared about sales figures in ages, particularly with this new format, but are we likely to see any third party software numbers for consoles? I'm interested to see what the actual numbers are for Homefront and Crysis 2. Could perhaps surmise Homefront is anywhere between 800K and just under a million. Hard to guess on Crysis 2 since it is below Lego Star Wars which is on just about every platform.
charlequin
Banned
lobdale said:
No, it's a pretty simple argument: we're in a buyer's market, which means you can't afford to overprice your content. Nintendo (and, like, every single publisher of a B-tier single player game on 360 or PS3 for the entire generation) has found that out the hard way. There are barely enough people who will pay "full price" for high-quality, content-rich titles with immense replayability; half-assed overpriced titles like Pilotwings don't have a chance.
charlequin said:
There's only 2 types of Nintendo games: Those that don't sell at all (S&P), and those that sell regardless of price (Mario). What is made in the discount market probably amounts to very little for them which is why they haven't been eager to pursue it.
Nintendo, unfortunately, is not a buyer market. Like Disney they will make you pay full price because they have all the franchises you want to play. The typical response is either to not care or forge a bitter hatred but buy it anyway because realistically skipping on a new Mario game just wasn't really an option.
CartridgeBlower
Member
Mojo said:
Why would they lower it when people still buy it at full price, five years after it came out?
And CoD games come out every year, so the price naturally drops when demand falls for the previous iteration. There hasn't been a Mario 64 2, and there never will, so the price stays high because the demand is always there.
charlequin
Banned
Somnid said:
That is a deeply poor analysis.
In Japan (where it's easier to pull up big lists of sales figures in one place), Nintendo published 46 different DS games that sold somewhere between 100k and 700k, with almost a $30 (3000 yen) price difference between the cheapest and most expensive title on the list. On Wii there were 20, and those titles again had a 3000 yen price gap.
Reducing that to "oh, everything Nintendo publishes would bomb completely unless it's Mario" is blinkered, fannish excuse-making, not serious analysis.
But realistically how many are buying it today? I think the demand would be more focused on NSMB and not M64 either way. But M64DS is just one example. They have a lot of titles that aren't evergreen titles across console/handheld, why not re-release them all as a budget line rather than discontinue mostCartridgeBlower said:
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
My argument over the last page was two-fold:
1) Companies need to rethink value more generally, because it's an insane buyer's market right now. The question this poses is "Can anything sustain being full price?"
2) Setting aside 1, how have low price "good enough" mobile games impacted higher budget games in terms of content and feature expectations, as well as the role of polish in pricing?
My stance is basically that Pilotwings isn't the kind of game that's worth $40 in 2011--polish or no polish, there simply isn't a broad enough featureset or enough content to justify it, even in a genre with virtually no competition... and even if it was worth $40 in general, I still wouldn't pay $40 for it because it's now vanishingly rare that I'd pay $40 for any game.
1) Companies need to rethink value more generally, because it's an insane buyer's market right now. The question this poses is "Can anything sustain being full price?"
2) Setting aside 1, how have low price "good enough" mobile games impacted higher budget games in terms of content and feature expectations, as well as the role of polish in pricing?
My stance is basically that Pilotwings isn't the kind of game that's worth $40 in 2011--polish or no polish, there simply isn't a broad enough featureset or enough content to justify it, even in a genre with virtually no competition... and even if it was worth $40 in general, I still wouldn't pay $40 for it because it's now vanishingly rare that I'd pay $40 for any game.
charlequin said:
I understand what you're trying to say but you didn't really get to it. None of that matters because it says nothing about the revenue they generated. I'm also guessing you're using retail price versus MSRP and neglecting used game proliferation (specifically that certain types have higher turnover than others).
Nintendo probably makes tons more with the "vault" strategy. Pull under-performing games from the market, reprint, remake, re-release content after several years in which the market has never been completely saturated with cheapened content and therefore demands it more. Much like Disney this works because they are Nintendo and control many high profile IPs. Pilotwings probably isn't worth the $40 it costs but there's a fanbase they can sell it to and the rest will pick it up because there's only like 10 3DS games anyway.
My personal opinion is that at this point it has little competition on 3DS and therefore might as well have it at that price. As the system actually grows a userbase and library then people will start having options and $40 is not okay for all games. But you want to set a standard early even though it's exceedingly rare for a launch title on any system to be worth full price because they often are shallow and rushed to meet launch dates. Yoshi's Touch and Go and Pokemon Dash were roughly the same thing on DS. Pikmin and Luigi's Mansion were on GCN, Wii Sports and Wii Play were on Wii. What you'd rather not do is place all games at the $20 they're worth and then raise the price. People pretend there is some value formula they follow but perceived raising prices will be received much worse than overpriced launch games where the value betters as time goes on.
This is one of those cyclic launch issues that always happens, people forget and then surprise themselves again every new console launch. Launch games are shallow.
Can you clarify that 'double digit' increase mentioned in Sony's PR applies to both PS3 and PSP or it's about combined sales, it's not really clear from the original note, we know both had increase in sales but if it's double digit too, at least %10, then we have a better estimation.jvm said:
charlequin
Banned
Somnid said:
Nintendo doesn't even use the vault strategy, and the vault strategy is outdated and ineffectual today. It's not 1985 anymore and it's dumb to take cues from outrageously anti-consumer strategies that worked back then because the information economy was still in the stone age.
That's ridiculous. We've seen the software and hardware underperforming. This isn't a hypothetical; we can actually look at the numbers and see that people aren't buying the software that's overpriced and aren't buying the system with the overpriced, under-delivering software.
Nobody's talking about putting "all games" at $20, that's just you excluding the middle once again because you feel compelled to defend Nintendo's suboptimal pricing choice. In reality, the market can accept much more price diversity than it does now -- Nintendo even proved that themselves on DS where they sold quite a bit of software at $20. There's no reason SSF4 shouldn't be $40*; Pilotwings and Nintendogs, however, would both be better priced in a value-to-consumer sense and generate significantly more revenue at $20.
*Well, none of the 3DS software should be $40, but there's no reason SSF4 shouldn't be full price.
AranhaHunter
Banned
charlequin said:
I know about the developer getting 70% and Apple getting 30% and I'm under the impression it's the same deal for XBL, where did you get the information that MS keeps 70% off XBL sales? That seems incorrect to me.
perfectchaos007
Member
Did the GBA outsell the DS in it's launch month like the DS outsold the 3DS?
charlequin
Banned
AranhaHunter said:
Huge thing several years ago about how MS was literally halving their payout. Might only apply to "Microsoft-published" titles, not sure, but definitely anyone who's getting on XBLA on their own rather than getting an (equivalently huge) cut taken by a major publisher is only getting ~35% of sales.
NemesisPrime
Banned
charlequin said:
This statement makes no sense TBH.
It all depends on many factors (like taxes for example).
I can confirm (without getting into details) that MS takes the same amount as other publishers and no, it is not 75%.
charlequin
Banned
Graphics Horse
Member
perfectchaos007 said:
Yeah, they sold over a million GBAs that month!
mclaren777
Member
Still no data on PS3 sales?
Nintendo's site has the top ten for wii and ds: http://www.nintendo.com/games
Wii:
Just Dance 2
Zumba Fitness
Super Mario All-Stars
Michael Jackson The Experience
LEGO Star Wars III: The Saga Continues to Build
Mario Sports Mix
Donkey Kong Country Returns
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Mario Kart Wii
Just Dance
DS:
Pokémon White Version
Pokémon Black Version
New Super Mario Bros.
LEGO Star Wars III: The Battle For Bricks Just Got Bigger!
Mario Kart DS
Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-land Mayhem!
Plants vs Zombies
Okamiden
Disney Tangled: The Video Game
Call of Duty Black Ops
There's also some 3ds list but that doesn't look right lol
Wii:
Just Dance 2
Zumba Fitness
Super Mario All-Stars
Michael Jackson The Experience
LEGO Star Wars III: The Saga Continues to Build
Mario Sports Mix
Donkey Kong Country Returns
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Mario Kart Wii
Just Dance
DS:
Pokémon White Version
Pokémon Black Version
New Super Mario Bros.
LEGO Star Wars III: The Battle For Bricks Just Got Bigger!
Mario Kart DS
Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-land Mayhem!
Plants vs Zombies
Okamiden
Disney Tangled: The Video Game
Call of Duty Black Ops
There's also some 3ds list but that doesn't look right lol
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/library/events/110426/img/10l.jpg
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/library/events/110426/img/11l.jpg
Estimated:
PS3: 365,000
PSP: 188,000
Give it or take a couple of thousands.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/library/events/110426/img/11l.jpg
Estimated:
PS3: 365,000
PSP: 188,000
Give it or take a couple of thousands.
Graphics Horse
Member
I'd never have guessed PSP was selling more units in the US than Japan. Edit: Seems around the same? 190k ish March total.
Edit: I'm stupid and comparing previous 5 weeks in Japan instead of March weeks. Someone else have a go.
Edit: I'm stupid and comparing previous 5 weeks in Japan instead of March weeks. Someone else have a go.
pharmboy044
Member
Not sure why Sony did not give these numbers. They look pretty respectable for March.Road said: