Kinect Hardware and Software Sales - Pre-Christmas Roundup - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 20 December 2012 / 14,264 Views
An article by the VGChartz Sales League, spearheaded by: Bastian Zimmer (Barozi)
Introduction
As we've seen in past years’ holiday seasons, Kinect hardware and software sales have thrived during the last three months of 2012.
This article will attempt to guide you through Kinect’s hardware and software figures for the last third of the year (months September to January), and highlight some of the key observations and numerical relations discovered.
And without further ado, the numbers.
Hardware
Even though we haven’t reached the end of the year just yet, the hardware sales for Kinect this holiday season have driven the sales figures for the last 4 months of 2012 to beat out the first 8 months of the year. This means that the holiday sales were considerable enough that what Kinect sold in the first 8 months, it was able to match in the last 4 months.
Table 1: Sales of Kinect HW from Jan-Aug compared to Sept to Dec.
It seems, however, that Kinect is experiencing its weakest holiday season in its short history.
Figure 1: Kinect HW Sales from Dec 2010 to Dec 2012
As you can see from above, the holiday season sales spike of 2010 and 2011 are quite larger than the sales spike for 2012 (after the last major gridline).
Looking forward to Kinect’s projected lifetime, based off the trends of 2011, expect sales by the end of 2012 and by early 2013 to follow this curve:
Figure 2: Sales for Kinect HW extrapolated into 2013 based on end of 2011 early 2012 trends.
That would bring Kinect lifetime sales to be just above 20 million at the end of the year and slightly above 5 million for FY 2012 (down 37% YOY from 8m for FY 2011).
Software
While hardware sales for the period of Sept. to Dec. are about to eclipse the first 8 months of this year, the same can't be said about software. Given sparse notable game releases for Kinect coupled with sales figures of games VGChartz currently don't track (such as Harry Potter for Kinect, Kinect Sesame Street TV, Kinect Nat Geo TV and Zumba Fitness Core), the software sales numbers can’t keep up with the hardware trends over the holiday season.
Moreover, the strong legs of last year's games (Kinect Sports Season Two, Just Dance 3, Dance Central 2 and Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012) dwarf the sales of 2012 releases in comparison, even when looking at sales made in 2012.
Table 2: Sept. to Dec. 2012: sales for certain key Kinect games; some older, some newer.
Sorted by Sep. to Dec. ‘12 sales.
(games released pre-2012 which sold less than 50k were ignored)
Notable holiday software releases for this year include Just Dance 4, Dance Central 3 and Fable The Journey. While Just Dance 4 (361k YTD) and Dance Central 3 (299k YTD) were off to a good start, they are not living up to the high sales expectations set by their older brothers (JD3 and DC2). Both titles will have a hard time hitting the one million milestone, which was easily crossed by their previous iterations.
Figure 3: Trends for the Just Dance and Dance Central series’ last two entries.
Fable The Journey sits at a very average Metascore of 61, and with a total of 117k units sold for the game, it seems that most consumers aren’t entirely convinced.
Older Kinect games however are faring much better, with Kinect Disneyland Adventures leading the way with 874k units sold in this short time frame. Not too surprising since it’s included in this holiday's 4GB Kinect bundle. Speaking of bundles, there has been a second Kinect bundle including the 250GB Xbox 360 and Kinect Sports (620k).
Next in the list of holiday sellers not mentioned earlier are this year's released Kinect Star Wars (241k), and the pre-2012 releases of Zumba Fitness (186k), WipeOut in the Zone (148k), Dance Central 2 (139k) and Dance Central (111k).
More graphs and tables
Here we list a few more graphs and tables for your viewing.
First you’ll find the yearly software sales for Kinect. From this graph, you can see that 2011 was the best year for Kinect SW sales, but 2012 is not over yet.
Figure 4: Kinect software sales comparison between 2010, 2011 and 2012. (Kinect Adventures excluded)
Next, you can find the latest milestones for Kinect software Sales. Kinect Sports has finally reached 5 million sales. These milestones were achieved quite close to December 8th.
Table 3: Software milestones for 2012
And lastly, below is the reference table for Kinect software sales.
Column 1: LTD sales until Dec 31 2011
Column 2: Sales (From Jan 1st to Sept 1st 2012)
Column 3: Sales (From Sept 2nd to Dec 8th 2012)
Column 4: LTD sales until today
Table 4: Kinect software sales figures, on a game by game basis, and totals at bottom.
The full chart can be found here.
Summary
To recap, we saw that the HW sales for the last 4 months (the strong period of the year for Kinect) matched the HW sales for the first 8 months of Jan to Aug at 1.79m Kinects sold per period.
Projections for Kinect HW is 20m LTD by early 2013 and 5m for FY 2012, mind you 2012 has been the weaker of the 3 Christmas seasons Kinect has seen in terms of HW numbers.
In software, the sales didn’t keep up with the hardware trend, though games released before 2012 are still very well alive, the best beating off the top sales for games released in 2012.
Some key titles from 2012 are not keeping up with the trends of their older entries (JD4, DC3), and Fable the Journey is seeing some low sales. On the bright side, however, 2012 has some hot holiday sellers in the main bundled games (Kinect Adventures, Kinect Disneyland Adventures and Kinect Sports) for combined sales of 3.3m for the SW titles. The three main 2012 games (JD4, DC3 and Kinect SW) sold 901k combined, so it’s still a healthy holiday season.
With milestones of 5m+ units reached for Kinect Sports and 1.5m+ for Kinect Disneyland Adventures, the casual piece of tech is still well alive.
Be sure to post your comments below!
Acronyms:
FY: Full Year sales (sales for a given year, the whole year through)
YTD: Year to date (sales for the year up until a given date, usually the article publish date)
LTD: Life to date (sales since release up until a given date, usually the article publish date)
About the VGChartz Sales League
The VGChartz Sales League is a group of members from VGChartz with a passion for sales and numbers, and who are pumped to deliver some exciting and informative articles for the VGChartz community.
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Why doesn't VgChartz track Sesame Street and Harry Potter Kinect?
Well for one it's not possible for Game DB Admins to add games anymore (this is not really a new issue), so I could imagine that ioi or someone else would need to create a game to the database.
Now because of that some less popular and thus lower selling games aren't added because they don't know that they exists.
None of the mentioned games would do wonders, but there are only 8 Kinect games from 2012 on the list/database out of 23.
Looking at the full chart in my thread, those 15 missing games would easily do 50k on average til the end of the year and 100k lifetime, which means that ~1.5m software sales are missing at the end of the gen.
It looks like Kinect is on the decline in terms of overall unit sales for dedicated games but I think it has established a stable niche.
Software lagging behind HW not a surprise as kinect is a bundled attachement and there really arent that many dedicated games for it. Got a used one to play Dance Central 3. There isnt really anything else worth getting for Kinect at the moment.
Oooooo a good article. I like I like. Should have concluded with Kinect sales are crashing and will likely be really small next year, or something, but other then that AAA.
Mmmm, without counting the bundles Kinect Adventures, software sales for Kinect are, well bad almost. Low tie-ratio and the saving grace are the first few games which managed to get over 2m. Sales for the device itself are pretty good. Especially when considering this is 'just' an accessory!
yeah like barozi said. if i would buy 6 games for 360 not working with kinect and 4 games for kinect my 360 would have a ratio of 10 but kinect only 4.
cancer!
Hey Michael, he means the first of many nice articles by the league. The ones before this are nice too, sales articles take work :)
