Sales

Summer of Arcade looks to start off with a bang. As of noon (Robomodo time) today the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD leaderboards broke 100k players. While not a …
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According to Gamasutra’s monthly Xbox Live Arcade Sales Analysis Zen Studios needs to be gearing up for an office party or something. As of the first of this month …
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This morning Markus “Notch” Persson, the man behind the wildly successful Minecraft, tweeted that Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition surpassed over 3 million units sold. Everyone knew this game was …
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Microsoft announced today that revenue for the fiscal 2012 fourth quarter ending June 30 reached $18.6 billion. That figure, which Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Steve Ballmer identified …
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More sales that you might have missed.
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During all the hoopla of E3, Xbox Live Arcade snuck silently past a rather large milestone as noticed by friend of the site, @Lifelower. Our own XBLA historian, Andrew …
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The first episode of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead has officially sold a million copies in its first few weeks on the market, reports Joystiq. The figure takes into account both buyers who downloaded the first episode individually and those who bought a “Season Pass” for all five episodes, the report says.

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It frightens me to think how much money I’ve spent over the years on video games. True, I may not be walking down Rodeo Drive with 20 handbags full of dresses, jewelry and shoes, but I really wonder how many of us could give the traditional shopaholic a run for her money when it comes to the amount of money we’ve dropped on games, guides, consoles, and the like. Considering consoles range from the 2-500 USD when they’re released and games have always been in the 50-60 USD range. Game guides are roughly half that price, as are controllers. Other game peripherals can be as much as twice the cost of a game.

Yikes.

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When the Xbox 360 launched in November of 2005, the console wars were largely viewed as a two-horse race. Nintendo’s Wii was an afterthought in the minds of most industry analysts and executives — a belief that would be proven correct in terms of relevance among the traditional gamer audience, but so very wrong on the sales front, as it marched on to over 95 million units sold worldwide as of March. Rather, both popular and informed opinion said the battle would be fought between Sony and Microsoft.

Sony had spent the past 10 years decimating Nintendo and Sega’s positions as dominant forces in the industry by appealing to an older consumer and making the PlayStation 2 the best-selling home console of all time with more than 150 million consoles sold as of the end of last year. After having replaced the name “Nintendo” with “PlayStation” as a synonym for video games, the Tokyo, Japan-based electronics empire was feeling as invincible as Superman. With Nintendo having done its damnedest to torpedo its relationships with third-party developers and the software behemoth in Washington looking like the proverbial babe in the woods when it came the console biz, Sony could see no kryptonite in sight. Of course, few outsiders did either at the time.

Had it not allowed the pride that success brought to convince it that sinking so much of its PS and PS2 profits into the foolhardy enterprise of out-muscling the Xbox 360 with the PlayStation 3, however, it might have foreseen that it was on a path to learn the same hard and humbling lesson it had itself taught Nintendo. Instead, it produced an expensively priced machine that arrived a year late to the party and quickly built a reputation, fair or not, of being notoriously difficult to develop for. Geekwire reports that when he spoke to the Northwest Entrepreneur Network last week, Robbie Bach, former president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, highlighted how Sony’s miscalculations and mismanaged generational shift opened the door for the 360 to become the hugely profitable success that it is today.

“When you’re doing a startup, you need friends. It’s just the way life works,” Bach said. “It turned out we were able to convince retailers and publishers like Activision, Electronic Arts and others, that it was a good thing for Microsoft to be successful, because if we were not successful, the only game in town was Sony. Being dependent on somebody else was bad for them, and so they supported us disproportionately to what they should have, mathematically.”

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Five Xbox Live Arcade titles, including two from Double Fine, have had their prices temporarily cut. Costume Quest, Stacking, Voltron, Warhammer 40K: Kill Team and Apples to Apples have all seen price reductions of 50% as part of the THQ Publisher Sale. The deal applies to both Gold and Silver account members. In addition, all downloadable content for Stacking, Costume Quest and Apples to Apples has been reduced to half price. But are the games any good?

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