14 DAY TRIAL // The NPD Group figures for May were pretty grim, showing that the video game industry dropped about 5% when compared to the same period of 2009, with sales of consoles being the worst hit and Super Mario Galaxy 2 not managing to sell more than 1 million units in its launch month.
Speaking to MCV Michael Pachter, who is an analyst watching the video game industry for Wedbush Morgan, stated that “We expect investors to remain spooked by the May results, as they are beginning to reinforce the notion that the videogame industry is in a state of persistent secular decline. Despite May’s easy percentage and dollar comparisons and long-anticipated debuts for a handful of games, it became clear that several of May’s games performed well below expectations as the month progressed.”
One of the main problems of the industry seems to be Nintendo, which continues to sell quite a lot of the Wiis and the DS handheld but has begun to lag behind when it comes to sales of videogames for their platforms.
It seems that compared to the same period of 2009, the Wii lost no less than 29% of all video games sales, while the DS line up was also down about 13 percent. This just as both the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony registered increases of 29% and 58 percent, respectively. It's not clear whether the trend is a result of the quality of video games launched for the Nintendo devices or of a saturation on the part of the customers who bought the consoles.
Pachter added, “We think this is remarkable, given growth in the Wii hardware installed base of 44 percent and growth in the DS installed base of 33 percent over the last 12 months. In our view, this indicates that Nintendo’s customers either are not finding enough software to satisfy their needs, or need less software than the typical Sony or Microsoft customer.”