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Hardware Shortages Weaken Holiday Sales

Posted by Zonk on from the not-so-much-with-the-forward-thinking dept.

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that GTA: San Andreas was the tops in December sales, but overall 2004 sales were somewhat down because of PS2 and Xbox hardware shortages. From the article: "That leaves the industry on negative growth of one per cent for the calendar year, and even considering software alone, December still saw negative growth of five per cent and brought the calendar year growth figure down to seven per cent."

4 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. What about the PC? by kaellinn18 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It looks like this article is only referring to console sales. What about the PC industry? One would think that it's sales increased, what with the release of WoW, EQ2, HL2, and Doom 3. Those are just the major one off the top of my head. I'm sure there are lots more.

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  2. There's still a shortage by Saige · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There is still a shortage.

    I tried, last Friday (2 1/2 weeks after the holidays) to try an buy an XBox. Everywhere I checked, not only did they not have any in, they hadn't had any for almost a month, and had no clue when they were going to get more.

    I ended up looking around online, and finally found a place that had XBox + DVD player bundles for sale. That was all I could find. Though to be honest, I didn't go to the level of checking eBay or looking at random little web shops.

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  3. Re:Reminds me of a rather funny story... by Gigahurt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I work part-time at Target. The funniest thing I heard all season: "I'm looking for a PSAdvanceBoxDS2." This really happened and the customer said it directly to me. She was stone-cold serious. Luckily, we were out of all of them so I didn't have to tell her what was wrong with her statement.

  4. More info by Bloomy · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Gamerfeed has a report stating that the industry had over $9.9 billion in revenues in 2004, compared to $10 billion in 2003. And that while revenues were down, "total industry unit sales were up 4 percent over the same period last year."

    Also, a New York Times article (mirror) says PC games are not included in the current numbers. They will be available "in the next few days."