14 DAY TRIAL // Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is now out and Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan, has predicted that the game will sell more than 7 million copies during this year, making it one of the best sellers of 2010, despite the fact that the title is only coming to the PC and sits in the rather niche real time strategy genre. Now another analyst, Colin Sebastian, working for Lazard Capital Markets, is saying that during the first three months on sales gamers will pick up 4.5 million units of Starcraft II, with another 2 million getting it before the end of the year, mainly around Christmas.
The new prediction comes after Starcraft II was reported to have seen strong pre orders in the run up to launch, with a lot of gamers going for the more expensive Collector's Edition, which comes ti UDB dog tags that contain the first game and its expansion and other goodies, like a comic book and a soundtrack.
Overall Colin Sebastian sees the games industry continuing to struggle during the rest of 2010, with the overall sales numbers in North America down around 8 percent over the same period during last year. Despite the fact that the NPD Group does not track sales for PC titles the analyst sees Activision ready to report good results for its second quarters, boosted mainly by Starcraft II and Transformers: War for Cybertron. Other titles like Blur, Singularity and the new Shrek spin off did not perform as well.
Electronic Arts might also perform better than expected in the coming months, with pre orders for Madden NFL 11 being higher than expected, even though concern still remains about how the company plans to reinvent the Need for Speed franchise. THQ will experience a slow quarters because of low sales of UDC Undisputed 2010.