14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that after a tough month of May the video game industry should be getting ready for more bad news when the NPD Group launches its figures for the month of June. It seems that there are more PlayStation 3 Slim consoles available to eager customers and that the new smaller Xbox 360 generated an increase in sales for the Microsoft system but overall the industry will still be down when compared to the same period during 2009, according to prominent analysts.
Colin Sebastian, who is watching video games sales for Lazard Capital Markets, believes that the decrease will reach 15%, while Michael Pachter, working for Wedbush Morgan, is saying that the Nintendo Wii will see an increase of 11 percent, while the Xbox 360 sales go up by 35% and those of the PS3 increase by about 18 percent. The problem is that handhelds are seeing a rapid fall, with the Nintendo 3DS actually making the current generation of devices less attractive to customers.
June also lacked any big video game launches that could have pushed sales higher but analysts believe that the rest of 2010 has big launches that will reverse the downwards trend of May and June. July will witness the launch of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, which has the potential to sell more than 5 million units, and other big titles of the year are the Cataclysm expansion for World of Warcraft, Call of Duty: Black Ops from Activision and Medal of Honor from Electronic Arts.
Pachter also talked about how multiplayer could become a new stream of revenue for publishers, saying “We expect the publishers to monetize the value created by online play, led by Activision. With the early June launch of the second Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 map pack, we think that online game play will continue to be a drain on gamers' time and wallets, and think that sales will again slide into negative territory.”