Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Guitar Hero III the First Game to $1 Billion In Sales

Posted by Soulskill on from the rock-out-with-your-pocketbook-out dept.

The Opposable Thumbs blog reports that Guitar Hero III has reached a financial milestone, becoming the first individual video game to reach $1 billion in total sales. The number is even higher if you consider the rest of the franchise. In addition to helping drive the video game industry during tough economic times (much like the Wii), it's helping other industries as well: "... aside from the fact that Guitar Hero: Aerosmith had sold three times as many copies as the band's last album during their respective first weeks, musicians whose music is featured in the game has seen a rise in music sales to the tune of 15-843 percent." And CVG notes, "... two-thirds of non-musicians exposed to music games plan to start playing a real instrument in the next couple of years." Also, Rock Band creator Harmonix may be looking into a partnership with the record labels to sell music for use outside of the games.

2 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Woo by ZekoMal · · Score: 0, Troll
    Of course, if every game cost $90-150 depending on what bundle you get, or $50-60 if you just buy the game and don't want to use a guitar, I'm sure this wouldn't be as impressive.

    I find it funny that they didn't say how MANY were actually sold; by stating a price and not an amount, it seems like they only reached a record in how expensive it was, not in record breaking sales (the proof of that being that Wii Sports beat them out for that).

    So no, I'm not impressed. When it breaks sales records, I'll be impressed. Or, I would be impressed if they made a ridiculous profit per sale and managed to get away with hiking up the price of the product like mad. Not so impressed with 'look how much our expensive product made!'

    Being generous, I decided to pretend that every guitar hero III sold was $87.5, and decided to see how many sales that would be. That equates to, roughly, 11,428,571 sales.

    Pac-Man got 7 million sales.
    Super Mario Bros. sold 40 million, roughly.
    Super Mario 64? 11 million.
    Wii Sports sold 30 million copies, roughly.

    I could go on, as several more top that sales amount. In short, nothing groundbreaking about this. I'm sure if Super Mario Bros. cost $100 a pop, it would be permanently the biggest moneymaker in gaming history.

    1. Re:Woo by ZekoMal · · Score: 0, Troll
      I worked at Target when it came out, we sold it at either $90 or $50-60.

      Okay, so let's assume the best possible scenario, O guitar hero savior. Let's say every single person who purchased guitar hero III only spent $50. That puts them at 20 million copies sold.

      Still no record broken, so even if EVERY BUYER OF GUITAR HERO III spent the bare minimum $50 for a new copy of the game, they STILL didn't make a ground breaking amount of sales.