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EA Predicted to Announce Madden, NHL Sales Drops
bippy writes "Analyst PJ McNealy predicts that EA will announce Tuesday a 20 percent drop in sales for Madden and a 50 percent drop in sales for NHL 2005, partly due to the success of ESPN's low-price, high-content games. McNealy says this likely won't have a huge financial impact on the game developer, but it will affect them psychologically. I'm just surprised that ESPN's price cut worked. It seems that when Madden came out everyone was saying that the price cut wouldn't help ESPN or hurt EA."
There's no NHL season this year. I've bought the EA NHL game for years... but not this year. Why? Not because I bought a different game, but because I'm just not interested in playing a hockey video game when there's no hockey season.
MORTAR COMBAT!
"the only platform that matters -- PC"
check out the 2004 esa report "essential facts":
http://www.theesa.com/EFBrochure.pdf
in 2003, sales of cosole games were $5.8 billion, compared to $1.2 billion for pc games. oh, and the ps2 version of madden was the best selling console game - and it's not even on the top 20 list of pc games....
i'm a pc gamer at heart myself, but it's a small market when compared to the consoles... this year should see an increase though, with all the good pc games...
Some EA reps were recruiting in my area not too long ago, and the head of research (his name escapes me, but he was really cool guy) gave a speech. He explained to us that for sports games, they try to get the bulk of their revenues in the bag during the first 6 weeks of the respective sport's season. In NHL 2005's case, he explained that EA was already expecting that 2005 would not do well because nobody was psyched for the season with the strike, and hence nobody would be psyched to buy the game. Especially telling was the 25 minutes of EA game trailers before the speech with trailers for every EA Sports game, except NHL 2005.