USA Retail Sales Preview for September 2010 - News
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 11 October 2010 / 6,606 Views
NPD will be releasing data regarding the performance of the USA videogame market this Thursday at 6:30 PM Eastern Time. The data covers the five weeks ending October 3, 2010 (August 29-October 3). Based on VGChartz data for the same period, we expect NPD to report the following information.
September Overview
September was a strong month for top software, but a fairly bad month for catalogue software and hardware sales. PS3 and Wii lapped September 2009 price cuts this month, and combined both systems were down about 350,000 units dragging down hardware revenues for the month as the average price of those lost 350,000 systems is something like $230-$250. A solid $80 million in the year over year comparison came from the Wii / PS3 hardware drop off alone. Not all hardware news was bad though. Nintendo cut the DS price slightly on September 12, 2010, resulting in DS systems seeing a slight uptick in sales over September 2009 levels. Microsoft's X360 Slim effect started to wear off in September, but Halo: Reach and the associated special bundles pushed a bit of hardware. Still, September 2010 X360 sales were down against September 2007 sales - when Halo 3 launched and X360 was more expensive. Nonetheless, X360 was up over September 2009 when Halo 3: ODST launched. PSP and PS2 were also down from last year. Accessories were up a fair bit in September though, as Sony's Move launched and costs a fair bit of money, particularly for multiplayer motion-game play.
With all that said, VGC believes NPD will report the following revenue figures for the USA video game market in September. Figures are in millions of US dollars.
Despite stronger X360 and DS sales this month compared to 2009 levels, overall hardware sales continue to decline.
The DS increase in sales just about offset the price cut - and so X360 was really the only system to generate more revenue in September 2010 than in September 2009. Since September is 25% longer than August, PS3 actually saw a slight drop off from August sales rates, even with the Move and titles like Dead Rising 2. Wii (Metroid?), DS (price cut), PSP (Kingdom Hearts), and X360 (Halo) all saw nice increases in weekly sales rates over August 2010. October has a very broad range of strong content with titles like Medal of Honor, Rockband 3, NBA Jam, Wii Party, Fable III, Kirby, DJ Hero 2, etc, and so hardware should lift from September rates pretty much across the board - with the possible excpetion of X360 which could drop if Fable III or the big multiplats don't push hardware in the period between Kinect and Halo: Reach.
September software was dominated in units by Halo: Reach. However, in the top thirty, only 13 spots were taken by titles released for the month -the remaining 17 titles were older and in some cases much older. A solid one third of the top thirty titles for the month were released before 2010 even began. In the chart below, blue depicts titles released in September 2010, yellow depicts titles released before January 1, 2010 (Super Mario Galaxy 2 should be blue - I'll fix it shortly), and pink depicts titles releases from January to August 2010.
Wii Sports Resort and Move Champions are both partially bundled / partially unbundled, i.e. a user can have a Wii / PS3 bundled with the game, or not bundled with the game - and then pick it up seperately. Thus figures from NPD will be different from ours. Except for Microsoft, it wasn't a particularly good month for most publishers. EA had a strong month because of its seasonal sports titles, and Nintendo's evergreen sellers continue to perform well. From here on out, the top thirty should cut-off at higher and higher levels, as the volume of big titles increases. Come November and December the top thirty will cut off at 100,000 units or more. It should also be noted that with the major PC software released this month, overall brick and mortar software sales were likely up, rather than flat for the month.
Contact Vgchartz at jmazel@vgchartz.com
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@salnax, its not that it did bad in Americas, its that it did extremly bad in EMEAA, and metroid hasn't sold well in Japan for a long time. That is why people think its a flop. Its Americas sales are perfectly respectable.
Lol @ we wont get the chartz... rofl
For a flop, Metroid did pretty damn well. It was only beaten by Wii Sports and the latest Halo, and there is no shame in losing to those titles. Sports Champion did a bit worse than I expected.
ps3 dead
Super Mario Galaxy 2 wasn't released before January 2010.
Also, I don't think Sports champions is bundled with the PS3, is it?
lol PS3
"blue depicts titles released in September 2010, yellow depicts titles released before January 1, 2010, and pink depicts titles releases from January to August 2010."
What do the colors in the software chart mean?
