Slashdot Mirror
Game Consoles, Software Have Happy Thanksgiving
Thanks to Reuters for their report rounding up the sales figures reported for Thanksgiving by the major console makers. Nintendo announced "...it sold more than 500,000 units of its GameCube console during Thanksgiving week, roughly twice what it sold in the entire month of October", and Sony indicated "...the PS2 sold more than 1 million units in November, with sales of its $199 online-enabled Combo Pack doubling from October." Finally, Microsoft "...said year-over-year hardware sales for its second-place Xbox were up 7 percent during Thanksgiving week", with Halo sales peaking 435 percent after its price cut. Reuters also has a piece talking to software publishers, in which they're cautiously optimistic over "relatively strong" game sales.
This http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/031202/25455_1.html
is an interesting take on this news.
It claims Nintendo is in 1st place after Thanksgiving weekend, but appears to be combining sales of the GBA and GC. Either way, interesting news, if tricky...
While the PS2 can't quite match in the hardware department, there are still a few reasons that it does so well:
* Games exclusive to the system, especially RPGs. If you want to play certain games, like Final Fantasy X-2, you have to get the PS2.
* A very large game library. Yeah, a lot of it is crap, but there are so many more games for this system than the X-Box or GameCube. While all three systems have "Greatest Hits" series of cheaper classic games, the PS2 library of inexpensive games is also very solid.
* That library is even larger when you also consider the backwards compatibility of the system: add all the PS1 titles floating out there and you've suddenly got a much larger body of games. It may not mean much to an avid gamer who only wants the newest games, but I know a few parents who like the fact that it runs the games from the original PlayStation.
There are other reasons as well, but these are the ones that come to mind.
I think the numbers they are hoping for is about 9 million unit sales by year end. I can't remember if that was US only or world. Loss will be closer to $1 billion for the full year. The economics of video games are to sell em cheap at the beginning to get the installed base, so you get the best games, which allows you to rake in sales after you have a 30+ million installed base Then when TakeTwo wants to sell GTA 4 on the console with the best installed base, they will give you a cut of $15 per copy sold.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The GameFaqs top ten list isn't that good of a choice. GameFaqs is a huge hangout for RPG fans, and in particular Square fanboys. But overall, RPGs don't make up that big a percentage of games sales. Sure, in Japan RPGs are the biggest thing, but not elsewhere. I really doubt GameFaqs has very many readers from Japan.
Whenever there's a lull in high quality games, half the top ten will be Final Fantasy games.