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Game Consoles – March 2012 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Monday, April 16th, 2012

The March 2012 NPD figures are out for US video game sales, and the industry is looking for any signs that indicate things may be on the up again, following a pretty poor January and February period. It is also the first time in 2012 that included the release of an A-list title, Mass Effect 3.

As NPD no longer releases full hardware sales figures, this feature is reliant on the game companies, namely Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, to release their set of figures and based on “statement math” (that is, arithmetically calculate missing figures based on statements made). For March 2012, these are the statements made by the gaming companies:

Nintendo revealed that “nearly” 175,000 Wiis were sold in March (via IGN)
Microsoft revealed 371,000 Xbox 360 units were sold, with 42% of the home based console market share (source)
Sony did not reveal any figures for the PS3

A little bit of “statement maths” tells us that a little more than 337,000 PS3s were sold.

And so the figures for US sales in March 2012 are below, ranked in order of number of sales (March 2011 figures also shown when available, including percentage change):

Xbox 360: 371,000 (Total: 33.7 million; March 2011: 433,000 – down 14.3%)
PS3: 337,000 (Total: 20.7 million; March 2011: N/A)
Wii: 175,000 (Total: 39.3 million; March 2011: 290,000 – down 39.7%)

NPD March 2012 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of March 2012)

My prediction was:

March is traditionally a slightly slower month than February, so while the year-on-year downward trend may continue, there is the release of an A-list title in Mass Effect 3. The hardware sales order should remain the same.

The release of Mass Effect 3 really didn’t help hardware numbers, and March was, as expected, down compared to February, with the hardware order exactly the same as last month as well.

For the Xbox 360, this marks the 15 months in a row that the console has beaten the Wii and the PS3 as the best selling console for the month – a terrific result, and surprising considering what had happened just before the run began (the Wii had a huge lead for the first couple of years, and the PS3 Slim/price cut seems to have rejuvenated the system – then the Xbox 360 released its own “Slim” version, followed shortly by Kinect, and it has never looked back). Microsoft PR was also keen to point out that “Total retail spend on the Xbox 360 platform in March (hardware, software and accessories) reached $430 million, the most for any console in the U.S. and more than the spend on PS3 and Wii combined” – for all the talk of console numbers and consecutive sales leads, in the end, it’s the income that’s important, and the 360 is doing pretty well. The stellar performance of Mass Effect 3 on the platform was also a talking point, but we’ll cover that later on when we discuss game sales.

For the PS3, March can be seen as a positive one, with the PS3 only selling 34,000 fewer units than the 360 – the gap between the two consoles has narrowed in recent month. The exiting of Wii from the competitive home based console race, making it really a two horsed race, has probably helped the PS3 absorb a few more buyers, and it was the console that appears to have done the best when you do a year-on-year comparison for March. Still, it’s looking unlikely that the PS3 would catch the Xbox 360 in this generation (in the US of course, globally, that’s a different matter), even with the price cut that analysts have been calling for (which Microsoft can easily match). But while there is still some life, not much, but some in Kinect (with Star Wars Kinect just being released, plus Kinect support for Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim), the PlayStation Move appears to be dead in the water for now.

As mentioned above, the Wii is now selling around only half as many units as the PS3, not to mention the Xbox 360, and the final few month of the console as Nintendo’s lead home based platform could be a painful few. Like most Wii owners, Nintendo are now probably very keen to move on to something better. It’s probably a bit too early to provide an eulogy for the platform, as there’s still a good chance it may still end up staying the best selling console of this generation (in the US) if the Xbox 360 can’t make up the 6 million difference between now and when it too is retired.

For games, March was all about Mass Effect 3, and having sold 1.3 million units, it was the clear number one – the next best was Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City with less than half as many copies sold. ME3 also sold more than twice as many copies as ME2 when it first came out. For Microsoft, a little extra celebration is called for, as ME3 sold 4 times as many copies on the Xbox 360 than on the PS3. The sheer dominance of the Xbox 360 version can most likely be attributed to the first game in the series not being available on the PS3, and the nature of the series itself which allows gamers to continue on using save files from the previous game. Actually, if you look at the table below, you’ll see lots of new releases, but sales still managed to decline 26% compared to a year ago. Here’s the full software sales chart for March (new releases shown in bold):

Mass Effect 3 (EA – Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (Capcom – Xbox 360, PS3)
MLB 12: The Show (Sony – PS3, PSV)
NBA 2K12 (Take-Two Interactive, Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, PC)
SSX 2012 (EA – Xbox 360, PS3)
Street Fighter X Tekken (Capcom – Xbox 360, PS3)
Mario Party 9 (Nintendo – Wii)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Activision, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC)
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations (Namco Bandai – Xbox 360, PS3)
Major League Baseball 2K12 (Take-Two Interactive, Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, NDS, PC)

So prediction time. April is traditionally a very slow month, what with the Easter break and everything, so if the industry is looking forward to better results, it will be disappointed. The sales order for the consoles should remain the same. The list of new games being released looks quite lacking indeed, with Kinect Star Wars and The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings looking like the picks of the bunch on the 360, and hardly any new games of note on the PS3 judging by the current sales charts.

See you next month.

Posted in Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Game Consoles – March 2012 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Weekly News Roundup (15 April 2012)

Sunday, April 15th, 2012

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Not a very busy weeks judging by the number of news stories, so hopefully we can get this done rather quickly. I’ve been busy working on that little update for Digital Digest, which I promise will be launched next week, even if it’s still only half-completed (to be fair, it’s more like 80% completed). And you know I’m serious about meeting this rather artificial deadline by the fact that I didn’t even play that much Skyrim this past week!

One development that came too late in the week to be included was the March NPD results, and I’ll write the full report early next week.

Let’s start with the copyright news, starting with the revelation that, even within the MPAA itself, not everyone was convinced that SOPA was the right solution for the web piracy problem.

It seems the anti-SOPA/PIPA sentiment was also alive and well within the MPAA itself (photo credits: Alain-Christian @ flickr)

When the anti-SOPA Internet Society hired a former MPAA executive, there was a bit of a controversy as you would expect. This prompted the MPAA’s former chief technology policy officer, Paul Brigner, to come out and explain a few things about his new appointment, including his apparent opposition to SOPA/PIPA. It seems Brigner left the MPAA at least partially because he felt SOPA was not the right solution to the piracy problem, and that SOPA and other “mandated technical solutions” are not “mutually compatible with the health of the Internet”. If the MPAA can’t even convince it’s own tech policy officer of the merits of SOPA, perhaps it really doesn’t have much merit at all.

But you get the feeling that the MPAA will never be fully satisfied until they get the power to not only squash any website it wants, but also to force others (like ISPs, governments) to help them do most of the heavy lifting. They will have ruined the Internet by then of course, probably only to find out that piracy has not only not slowed, but it has shifted to other parts of the Internet that can’t be easily controlled or legislated. And that, without argument, would be a far worse situation than what the one today.

It appears “blowback” invariably happens every time the copyright lobby launches a new crackdown, especially using technological measures. Every DRM has been met with an even stronger anti-DRM. Going after torrent sites have only resulted in more resilient torrenting methods. Which seems to indicate that going after video embedding, the MPAA’s latest manoeuvre, may backfire as well. The MPAA is getting itself involved in a legal showdown that originally only involved an adult entertainment company, Flava Works, and myVidster, a website that allowed people to post and share their video embeds, but now includes the likes of Google, Facebook, the EFF, and of course, the MPAA. The tech giants saw the original court ruling, which was in favour of Flava Works, as severely flawed, setting a precedent that could have huge repercussions for the entire Internet. The judge in the case failed to make the distinction between linking/embedding, and hosting, something that could make Google Images liable for the copyright infringement of any image in its database for example, or make Facebook sharing a legal minefield. There was also the issue of a “repeat infringer” policy, or Flava Works’ claim that myVidster did not have one, and how it relates to linked/embedded and hosted infringement. It seems to me that the DMCA is rather unclear about what a “repeat infringer” is, and it seems the law leaves service providers and Internet intermediaries to define what it actually means and what kind of policy to implement, even if it is one not to the satisfactory of content holders. And since myVidster did have a working DMCA take-down process, and that it did not host anything, the ruling seems a bit harsh. Also, you have to question why Flava Works went after myVidster, instead of going after the hosts of the actual videos, the dime a dozen porn tube sites. The responsibility cannot keep on flowing downwards until you get to someone that’s easier to sue.

Hotfile's expert says the most downloaded files on their network were two open source files

An anti-MPAA theme seems to be developing this week, since the only other copyright story is also MPAA related. This one has to do with the MPAA’s lawsuit against Hotfile, where the MPAA, using their own expert, argued that 90% of all downloads on Hotfile were infringing content, and that the Hotfile had few, if any, legitimate uses. This week it was revealed that Hotfile’s own expert, Duke University law professor James Boyle, found that this really wasn’t the case at all. Professor Boyle found that in actual fact, the two most downloaded files on Hotfile were actually open source software, with more than 1.5 million downloads between them. And while the “90%” figure wasn’t entirely debunked, and I think it’s hard to argue against the fact that a large percentage of total downloads on file hosting sites like Hotfile and Megaupload are of the infringing nature, I think in terms of the sheer number of different uploads (ie. not taking into account the number of downloads), I suspect there is also a large percentage of non infringing files on these networks (your typical spreadsheet, Word doc, PDF, home videos and other files too large to share via email, that may very well only be downloaded once, but still a key reason why people use file hosting sites).

This really is another grey area in the law. Take an extreme example where 90% of all different files on Hotfile were non infringing, but 90% of all downloads were infringing, then would Hotfile’s non infringing uses make it legal, assuming the website had a working DMCA process? How much is too much, and how much is “enough” when it comes to anti-piracy?

High Definition

I read an interesting article this week on Forbes’ blog, where the headline was “Sony’s Blues Caused By Blu-ray”, a rather controversial title if you ask me.

The actual article, despite the headline, did cover more than just Blu-ray, and it did raise a couple of interesting points. So are Sony’s recent woes caused by Blu-ray? The recent woes being the global layoffs and the lack of profitability, of course, but to blame it on Blu-ray seems a bit counter-intuitive, considering Blu-ray seems to be the only recent success for Sony.

But what the Forbes blog, written by contributor Stephen Pope, was perhaps trying to say is that while Blu-ray is a victory for Sony, it just wasn’t a big enough victory to help the company stay profitable, and that in the end, it may even only a fleeting victory, considering the growing popularity of streaming vs discs.

Sony's Blu-ray victory may be short lived, as consumers are keen to move onto streaming (photo credits: mroach @ flickr)

I’ve long held the believe that Sony lost its dominance in the gaming sector by allowing the Xbox 360 to be a viable successor to the PS2, due to the one year delay in releasing the PS3 and the high initial cost of the hardware – both factors very much related to the included Blu-ray support. So while the PS3 helped Sony win the HD format wars, it also hindered Sony in keeping their dominance in the gaming arena. Looking at the current range of multi-platform games and the quality difference between the PC/Xbox 360 DVD version of the PS3 Blu-ray version, it seems the Blu-ray disc’s superior capacity has done little to actually benefit the gaming experience. And while the platform exclusives do try and make the best use of Blu-ray, they just aren’t selling enough to make a huge difference compared to the mega multi-platform franchises of Call of Duty or FIFA or GTA.

And streaming certainly does look like the future, if only for the fact that discs and the drives that read them are just not compatible with today’s portable devices. There is also a trend to consume more content (often for less money), and the physical cost and space that discs (and their packaging) requires, puts a limit on this consumption (while raising the price of it – last year, the average price people paid for streaming content was 51 cents, compared to $4.72 for discs). And access, with discs being limited to what you have purchased or what your rental outlet has in stock, just can’t compete with a streaming digital library of hundreds of thousands of titles that will never “run out of copies” (or suffer from bad scratches).

And even in terms of data storage, the 50GB Blu-ray offers, or even the 100+GB of BDXL pales in comparison to the TBs of data people need these days for their digital needs. So you have a multi-TB drive the size of a small book versus shelves full of BDs that you have to take time to burn, label, organize, that actually costs many more times than the drive – even in data storage, Blu-ray may be too little, too late.

So Pope certainly makes a few valid points, although I would say the biggest problem for Sony is that it is neither the design powerhouse that is Apple (Sony is at times too preoccupied with things like copy protection to consider things like ease of use, in my opinion), nor can it compete in the value stakes with the likes of Samsung (a company that’s also doing more on the innovation front than Sony, in my opinion).

For gaming, the March NPD was yet another victory for the Xbox 360 (that’s 15 months in a row where the Xbox 360 has been the top selling home based console), although being the best of a bad bunch may not be such a meaningful award.

Also interesting was the news that Mass Effect 3 sold 4 times as many copies on the Xbox 360 than on the PS3 (I’m assuming this is North America only). This is perhaps a special case because the game carries on your saved progress from the last game in the series, not helped by the fact that the original game wasn’t even available on the PS3 (instead, relying on an interactive comic to record the key decision carried over from the first game). Also not helping is the fact that the PS3 is getting itself a rather bad reputation for having inferior multi-platform games, not just on ME3, but also on the other mega franchises such as Skyrim and CoD.

And I guess I also have to mention Skyrim’s upcoming Kinect support for the Xbox 360 version. The preview video looks pretty cool, although it looks like the game will only take advantage of Kinect’s voice support (and so the same features can probably be replicated via the PlayStation Eye’s microphone, if Sony really wanted it to happen by giving Bethesda some financial incentives, or making it really easy programming wise to do so. Some of the new Kinect features are already available via PC mods though, with a normal microphone, or even via the Kinect connected to your PC).

Screaming Fus Ro Dah at your TV is probably the geekiest thing anyone will do this year!

The unrelenting force of my addiction to Skyrim means that, just by mentioning it, I now have the sudden urge to play it for another hour or two. Which of course means we’ve come to the end of this WNR. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (15 April 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (8 April 2012)

Sunday, April 8th, 2012

So my pretty half-hearted attempt at an April Fools Day joke did actually fool a few people, although as you’ll read later on in this WNR, that little made up news article might really have been a preview into the future.

It’s been two weeks since my last mention of Skyrim, but rest assured, I’m still playing. 125 hours through, I think I’m about half way through the available quests (but having only completed just 2 of the questlines so far). Well worth the $50 or so I spent on the game (compare that to, say, your typical 2 hour movie on Blu-ray for $20, it’s excellent value).

Now onto the news …

Staring with copyright news, I’ve made the point before that, despite conventional logic, decreasing piracy should not be the end goal of anti-piracy – instead, the goal should be to increase revenue.

And I’ve also made the argument that I don’t think all piracy leads to revenue loss – in fact, I think most acts of piracy don’t actually lead to any loss in sales, as these acts are performed by people who really don’t buy a lot of stuff, or don’t have the resources to buy any more.

France's "Hadopi" three-strikes law seems to have dramatically reduced piracy, without actually increasing revenue

With anti-piracy efforts around the world ramping up, and the closure of several well known (alleged) piracy haunts, it would be extremely interesting to see the full financial impact of this expected piracy reduction, some say by as much as 40% in specific sectors (music, for one, after the closure of LimeWire). And so when Hadpoi, the French agency tasked with managing their “three-strikes” regime, released a report detailing the success of the program, with headline making statements such as “69% reduction” in piracy rates, this might have been just what was needed to see the real relationship between piracy and revenue. But while the report made ever bigger claims about the effect the regime had on piracy, what was sorely missing though were hard evidence of a rise in revenue, which as I’ve noted above, should have been the real goal of the whole exercise.

And while Hadopi might have been coy on the financial side of things, it just happens that most industry financial figures are public and available online. Looking at the French music and movie industry, and their performances in 2011 compared to 2010 (a full year with “three-strikes” in effect), the figures, if interpreted in a silly way, may actually point to the opposite: that piracy may have been helping sales!

The French recorded music industry recorded a contraction of 3.9% in 2011, while the movie industry didn’t fare much better, with revenue down 2.7%. In fact, the music industry’s loss was actually greater than the global average of 3%, possibly significant given that most of these other countries still have laws that are perceived to be much weaker than France’s. Of course, to come to the conclusion that piracy was helping to fuel sales would be silly, and a mis-use of stats, and I guess it would also be slightly disingenuous to say that the piracy reduction didn’t have a positive effect on revenue. But what is clear is that there isn’t a 1:1 relationship between piracy and revenue loss, certainly not to the extent that the content industries have been trying to tell us.

What may be true is that the ever changing digital scene may have had a greater impact on the fortunes of both industries than the forced habit change of pirates in France. The music industry’s figures did show a dramatic increase in digital download revenue, higher than the global average, and that may be interpreted as a positive effect from “three-strikes”. But on the other hand, the introduction and adoption of new digital services such as Spotify, may actually be the main driving factor behind increasing sales. Similarly, while physical disc sales for the movie industry were down, VOD and other digital services recorded huge growth. So what may be actually happening is that new services are finally giving people, who used to pirate, the convenience (and the price point) they were craving. Unfortunately, most of these services probably earn less for their respective industries than compared to physical sales – sales that these industries had more control over. So innovation appears to be winning the war against piracy (who’d have thunk it?), but by being overly cautious and being overly obsessed with anti-piracy and DRM, the industries that had most to gain from this digital revolution can now only watch from the sidelines as companies like Apple, Amazon and Netflix take over a large part of the distribution process (and as a result, a large portion of the profits too). You snooze, you lose.

Viacom is still trying to fight YouTube, despite today's YouTube being totally different to the one it sued

It’s still not too late for them though, as they still control the content. As long as they realise the errors of their ways, and start embracing change, instead of fighting innovation, the content industries can still come out ahead as they have done with every technological transition that they have initially opposed. But that’s probably a little too optimistic, as these industries believe they’re in a fight for their lives, and they won’t quit until it’s probably too late. Take Viacom, who this week won an appeal to have their lawsuit against YouTube re-heard in court. The problem is that the YouTube that Viacom wanted to sue no longer exists, things have moved on piracy wise on the site, partially via threats such as their original lawsuit, but mostly due to changing user habits – and it is now a platform that companies like Viacom should want to be part of. Viacom, for their part, has been making the efforts, signing deals with Google to distribute their content via YouTube and Google Play and such, but you don’t really know if it’s them truly embracing the trend, or doing so reluctantly because everyone else is doing it (but still secretly want things back to the way it was). And if they do want to embrace services like YouTube, then why not just drop a lawsuit that they probably can’t win anyway?

MPAA chief Chris Dodd still holds out hope for SOPA/PIPA, and may have to "Bully" some tech companies into line to support future legislation

If the industry could only chill out and become a little bit less paranoid about piracy, perhaps we wouldn’t have the types of limitations, via geo-restriction, timed release windows and DRM, that technology providers have to contend with. And without these limitations, we may finally have a product or service that’s better than piracy, maybe not with a straight price comparison, but would be convenient and non-intrusive enough for people to not bother with torrents. Having access to all episodes of Stargate SG-1 via a $7.99 per month Netflix account, as opposed to downloading all the DVD-rips, for example (and an example that seems to be actually working in practice right now, judging by the relatively small number of leechers for the complete rip of the series on The Pirate Bay). But perhaps this too is far too optimistic, with MPAA’s chairman Chris Dodd this week still holding on to the hope that SOPA and PIPA will eventually pass through Congress (my April Fools Day joke news article aside), suggesting we haven’t seen the end of Hollywood and the record industry’s support for short-sighted and draconian non-solutions to the web piracy problem. Unfortunately, Dodd’s statement itself may not be considered that optimistic, as there are signs in the last few weeks (from the White House and beyond) that support is building again for SOPA like legislation. Meanwhile, the MPAA will certainly try to “Bully” more politicians into supporting it, while making sure this time these supporters won’t backflip just because a million or ten come out in opposition to any proposed legislation. We all need to get ready for another fight.

Speaking of paranoid, the MPAA’s latest fear is that Megaupload would somehow get access to the data stored on their (former) servers and would somehow re-launch Megaupload, perhaps in another jurisdiction. Considering the fact that the Megaupload guys actually want to avoid prison, I suspect there’s little, if any chance Megaupload could be relaunched. But this latest MPAA manoeuvre will make it harder for users to get back their legitimate files, not that the MPAA cares or anything.

In gaming news this week, I wrote a brief round-up of the latest “PS4” and “Xbox 720” rumours, starting with more creative names for both next-gen consoles.

Sony’s next console will have the codename Orbis, while Microsoft has chosen Durango. Orbis and Durango (sounds like two characters from a kid friendly adventure game), seems to have more similarities than differences, with both reported to be using AMD technology to drive both the CPU and GPU.

Not only that, both consoles seem keen to deploy some kind of anti second-hand game system, where each disc is locked to an account, and money needs to be paid (to Sony and Microsoft, who up until now have not been part of the second hand trade) to unlock a disc for another account. The latest rumours even sees Microsoft’s Durango borrow from Ubisoft’s playbook, with a requirement for a constant-on Internet connection (hope it isn’t true, because that would suck).

With neither console scheduled to make an appearance until late 2013, it’s perhaps a bit too early to take any rumours that seriously at this stage. Not that you should take anything I write seriously, April Fools or otherwise.

And on that serious/not serious note, that’s all I have for you this week. It’s not much, but it will have to do until next week. Happy Easter, Passover, and any other religious or non religious holidays that I may or may not be aware of.

Posted in Copyright, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (8 April 2012)

Game Consoles – February 2012 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

The monthly NPD video game sales analysis makes a return this month, after last month’s absence. Today, we look at the US video game sales stats for February 2012, based on figures compiled and “released” by NPD. With January’s rather poor showing, all eyes were on the February results, to see if January was just an aberration, or the start of a new downwards trend. Last February was a great month for game sales, with hardware unit sales up for all consoles compared to a year before – but given the bad January results, nobody is expecting the same this time round.

As NPD no longer releases full hardware sales figures, this feature is reliant on the game companies, namely Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, to release their set of figures and based on “statement math” (that is, arithmetically calculate missing figures based on statements made). For February 2012, these are the statements made by the gaming companies:

Nintendo revealed that 228,000 Wiis were sold in February (via PR email)
Microsoft revealed 426,000 Xbox 360 units were sold, with 42% of the home based console market share (source)
Sony did not reveal any figures for the PS3

A little bit of “statement maths” tells us that 360,000 PS3s were sold, a good enough result for Sony that I thought they might have wanted to publicize a bit more.

And so the figures for US sales in February 2012 are below, ranked in order of number of sales (February 2011 figures also shown, including percentage change):

Xbox 360: 426,000 (Total: 33.3 million; February 2011: 535,000 – down 20.4%)
PS3: 360,000 (Total: 20.3 million; February 2011: 403,000 – down 10.76%)
Wii: 228,000 (Total: 39.1 million; February 2011: 454,000 – down 49.8%)

NPD February 2012 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of February 2012)

There was no prediction last month, as there wasn’t a full analysis.

While sales of all the consoles were up compared to the dismal January, all consoles continue to sell much less than the same time last year, but for different reasons.

For the Xbox 360, still relatively comfortable as the best selling console of the month, the decline has a lot to do with the dissipating hype over Kinect, and the novelty of the new Xbox 360 form factor, which was still in play last year. With Kinect Star Wars not coming until April (and even then, it doesn’t look as if it will make a huge impact, sales wise), the Kinect unlikely to lift Xbox 360 sales beyond helping it stay ahead of the PS3.

For Sony, the PS3 had the smallest year-on-year decline of the home based consoles, and comprehensively beat the Wii by just over 130,000 units, both facts that I had assumed Sony would have wanted to promote, but they remained oddly silent on PS3 figures, only commenting on the PS Vita, which managed to sell 225,000 units. With nothing really hyping up PS3 sales this time last year, the 10% or so decline might be the one that best show the industry’s overall decline. Whether this is due to market saturation, the end of a generation cycle, economic conditions, it’s all hard to say.

But it’s definitely the end of a cycle for Nintendo’s Wii, and the Wii U can’t come soon en0ugh for the company. A near 50% decline year-on-year is a bad result no matter how you look at it, and in terms of hardware, and innovation, the Wii now looks like a very dated piece of tech. With no multimedia and very little online functions to prop up the console’s usefulness, as is the case with the Xbox 360 and PS3, the Wii was always more prone to the “gathering dust in the closet” effect.

Software wise, it was another slow month as the lack of any A-list releases probably also hurt hardware sales. Final Fantasy XIII-2 was the top selling new release, despite technically being released in January (but counted in the February reporting period). Modern Warfare 3 remained the top seller for the month. The only platform exclusive to make the top 10 below was Sony’s update of Twisted Metal, coming in at 9th. Here’s the full software sales chart for February (new releases for February 2012 in bold):

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Activision, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC)
Final Fantasy XIII-2 (Square Enix, Xbox 360, PS3)
UFC Undisputed 3 (THQ, Xbox 360, PS3)
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (EA, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Just Dance 3 (Ubisoft, Wii, Xbox 360)
NBA 2K12 (Take-Two Interactive, Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, PC)
Soul Calibur V (Namco, Xbox 360, PS3)
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Twisted Metal 2012 (Sony, PS3)
Battlefield 3 (EA, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)

Time to make a prediction. March is traditionally a slightly slower month than February, so while the year-on-year downward trend may continue, there is the release of an A-list title in Mass Effect 3. The hardware sales order should remain the same.

See you next month.

Posted in Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Game Consoles – February 2012 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Weekly News Roundup (11 March 2012)

Sunday, March 11th, 2012

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. I hope you’ve had a good week. Me? I’ve been busy with a secret project for Digital Digest, something I hope I can unveil in a week or two. Well, it’s not really a secret, but it’s not ready for public consumption just yet. It will be a relatively small change on the scale of things, but hopefully one that will make navigating the website a little bit easier.

As such, I haven’t really been playing much Skyrim this week. I might also be playing the game the wrong way, because I now have quite a backlog of major and minor quests that’s going to be a pain to clear (and I keep on picking up new ones). Sometimes having too much to do in a game can be a frustrating experience too.

It's better, but what I want to know is what are the new things I'm able to do with the new hardware, that I couldn't do on the iPad 2

I suppose I should also mention the iPad 3, oops, I mean the “new iPad”. It seems I’m not the only one that’s under-whelmed by Apple’s new tablet offering (and not the only one to cringe at the “resolutionary” pun either). There’s really nothing wrong at all with the new iPad – it’s faster, it’s a little bit heavier than the iPad 2 but does not affect usability, the screen is a beauty and the price is right too. So why am I under-whelmed? For me, it’s the lack of “the new things you can do with it” that’s under-whelming – a sharper screen is better, but how does that translate into a new way to use the iPad?

Apple’s strength has always been in selling what you can do with its hardware, rather than the hardware itself (which traditionally hasn’t been state-of-the-art – see Mac vs PC debate). For example, Apple didn’t sell the fact that the iPad 2 had a front facing camera, it sold the concept of FaceTime. The iPod also wasn’t the first digital music player, but Apple sold it, alone with iTunes, as a new way to buy music. I won’t even need to mention what the iPhone meant, but even the incremental 4S upgrade introduced Siri, a new way to use your smart device that unexpected failed to make the transition to the new iPad (not yet, anyway). Imagine if Apple had launched the iPhone 4S without Siri – that, to me, is what the new iPad feels like.

With that said though, the new iPad still looks like a no brainer for people who want an easy to use tablet, so it will sell in droves regardless. But I just think Apple could have marketed it a bit better, to at least give us a glimpse of what the faster processor, better screen is capable of, that makes the iPad 2 obsolete. But maybe that’s not the strategy this time, as perhaps the major change this time is the introduction of a new budget iPad model – the old iPad 2. Good enough for most people, and at $399, it will offer serious competition to budget Android tablets.

Anyway, let’s get started on the news roundup.

The impact of the Megaupload seizure continues to reverberate this week, as the MPAA now wants to use the seizure as proof of guilt in its own court case.

Back when the Mega-seizure happened, I mentioned the MPAA’s civil lawsuit against Hotfile, and how Hotfile and Megaupload’s business models were very similar. I suggested that if no criminal case had been brought up against Hotfile, and that the matter was largely proceeding on civil grounds, then what makes Megaupload so different that the FBI needs to get involved. This week though, the MPAA made the same argument, but the one on the other side of the coin, that because Hotfile and Megaupload were so similar, Hotfile is just as guilty, and so the court should hand down a summary judgement on the matter. The MPAA is using the fact that because a court has granted federal prosecutors the right to take such drastic actions against Megaupload, that there is already enough evidence to suggest that their business model would not stand up to scrutiny in a court of law. There’s is some merit to the argument, but the government has yet to prove its case against Megaupload in a court of law, no matter how convincing their (one sided, it has to be said) arguments have been so far.

The curious thing is that if the MPAA is granted a summary judgement against Hotfile, then this decision could be used in the Megaupload trial as some sort of precedent, even though the summary judgement may have only occurred due to the Megaupload case. It’s a kind of circular logic that could very well have been orchestrated by the MPAA (since the MPAA are one of the key instigators of the Megaupload takedown), to kill two birds with one stone.

The scale of the Mega-takedown has also had consequences for other governments and law enforcement agencies not wanting to look weak on copyright (I’m sure the likes of the RIAA and MPAA have been pressuring them to match the efforts shown by the US government). The Swedish government has no doubt been under a lot of pressure to take action against “Swedish” website The Pirate Bay, particular now that the website has switched to using a Swedish .se domain name. What the Swedish government wasn’t aware of was that investigative notes were being leaked to the operators of The Pirate Bay. And from those leaks, it appears a new series of raids and arrests might be occurring soon. Having already been raided once, which took the website down for a whole three days, the new Pirate Bay seems to be designed to be much more resilient, much harder to take down (and easier to get back up again). The cat and mouse games between the authorities and TPB has only managed to create a stronger mouse – the cat simply hasn’t been able to keep up.

French "three-strikes" has been working for two years now, but where's the evidence it's actually "saving" the music and movie industry?

Staying in Europe, last week, the UK High Court handed down a ruling that paves the way for ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. This week, another ruling against ISPs paves the way for the UK’s own version of “three-strikes” to go ahead, as the Court of Appeal upheld the legality of such a system. Not that there’s any evidence to suggest that graduated response, the technical term for “three-strikes”, actually works. I recently read that the French version of three-strikes, nicknamed Hadopi (after the government agency responsible for it) is costing as much as $90 million per year to run. Whereas the only evidence of the program’s success so far, that has been presented by rights holder, is a measly 5% increase in revenue for iTunes over a 2 year period. Considering that iTunes sales worldwide (and with most countries not having a three-strikes regime) went up 36% year-on-year based on Q3 2011 results, the measly 5%, over a 2 year period, seems quite insignificant, and might even point to the opposite conclusion if we’re being cavalier with our statistical analysis. To me, graduated response simply isn’t worth it from a financial point of view, and it’s definitely not worth it when you factor in loss of privacy and other rights.

Losses due to piracy has always been a debatable subject. Whether someone who pirated software ever intended to buy the same thing is almost impossible to predict, as it’s really hard to know what people are wiling and unwilling to pay for. Take Warner Bros. latest idea, their “Disc to Digital” program. The program asks DVD owners to drive to a retail store, hand their original disc to a clerk, who runs the disc through a special machine that eventually produces a purely digital version of the disc, for use on iPads and whatnot (complete with DRM, of course). WB thinks people are willing to not only go to the trouble of doing this, as opposed to simply ripping it at home, but that they’re also willing to pay for the same movie twice. And so if people are not doing it WB’s way, and they’re not making this extra profit, then WB will simply count this as “lost” revenue, and blame it all on home DVD ripping.

Public Knowledge - "Legal DVD Ripping" alternative

Warner Bros. "Disc to Digital" program vs traditional DVD ripping, compared

If you think WB’s legal DVD ripping solution is convoluted, then you’re not alone, because public interest group Public Knowledge also think it’s ridiculous to suggest that consumers would embrace this “alternative”. PK is currently petitioning the US Copyright Office to legalize DVD ripping, and one of the arguments put forward by movie studios, against the idea, is that legal alternatives exist – WB’s “Disc to Digital” being one of the examples referenced by the MPAA. There’s obviously a demand for DVD ripping, even the movie industry accepts this is the case, as otherwise, they wouldn’t be offering their own solution to the problem. But if this is the industry’s idea of adapting to consumer demand, then it really just highlights again how out of touch they have become, and how we really shouldn’t trust their idea of “lost revenue”.

And finally in copyright, a story about our good friends Righthaven, and possible one of the last ever stories on the infamous copyright firm. This week, a judge granted the request to auction off most of Righthaven’s existing copyrights, including the very rights they obtained for sue-for-settlement purposes. Without having any rights to the content they’re pursuing bloggers and non-profits for copying, it really puts an end to all of their pending lawsuits (and appeals), and this, more than anything, is a mortal blow for the firm. Unless Righthaven can manage a revival of Lazarushian proportions, I suspect the next story I write on the firm will be its obituary.

In gaming news, the NPD stats for February 2012 are out, and it looks like I *will* be able to write an analysis for it thanks to there being enough data.

The Xbox 360 won the month again, although both the PS3 and Wii recovered from the January lows. All are down compared to the same month last year though. The lack of any really good releases, and the fact that we may be getting towards the end of the current generation’s sales cycle (or at least well past the midway point), suggests that sales won’t be picking up until the next-gen comes out.

Speaking of next-gen, the latest rumour says the Xbox 720 or whatever may in fact be disc-less. So definitely no Blu-ray playback if that’s the case, although I think physical media are still very much needed to distribute multi Gigabyte games to millions of gamers given the current state of high speed (ie. 40Mbps or faster) broadband saturation. The same argument exists for HD movies, which is why Blu-ray discs will still be around for a while yet.

I think that covers everything for this week, so have a nice one and see you in seven.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (11 March 2012)

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Game Consoles – March 2012 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Weekly News Roundup (15 April 2012)

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Game Consoles – February 2012 NPD Sales Figure Analysis

Weekly News Roundup (11 March 2012)

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