14 DAY TRIAL // The NPD Group figures for December 2009 are set to arrive in a few days and analysts are scrambling to build some reputation with potential customers and the public by anticipating the way the hardware and the software charts will look.
The overall consensus seems to be that December 2009 will see a decrease in revenue over the same period of 2008 despite the various promotions retailers implemented and the good performance of some of the videogames released earlier in the year.
Colin Sebastian, who works for Lazard Capital Markets, has said that “With the close of the holiday shopping period, our channel checks indicated generally stable video game hardware and software sales through the end of December - still reflecting the challenging consumer environment, but with signs of life primarily at the high and low ends of the product spectrum.” His projections show a fall of 5 to 10% hitting the United States videogames market in December.
Michael Pachter, who works for Wedbush Morgan, is courageous enough to actually tackle the numbers themselves. He believes that 3,200,000 Nintendo Wii units were sold during the period, which is almost 50% more than in 2008, alongside 1,350,000 Xbox 360 game consoles and 1,400,000 units of the Sony made PlayStation 3. Modern Warfare 2 from Infinity Ward and Activision is widely expected to remain the best sold videogame during December.
The bad news is that the market is down even though hardware sales appear to be rebounding from the lows registered earlier in 2009. Part of the growth is driven by the reductions in price implemented across the board by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony and these companies might need to push much more hardware to customers in order to get the same revenue as in the past year. We’ll have the actual NPD Group numbers and commentary on Friday.