Thoughts on January 2010 Top Sellers

If you saw the January Xbox 360 new releases forecast as part of the article on IndustryGamers in my last blog post...Mass Effect 2 was a bit off. My bad. Actually the model on RPGs works quite well, I just didn't run it quite right and now have fixed that so expect a return to better results like the one for Nov 2009.

Below is the table of January 2010 top sellers as publishedby NPD on IndustryGamers:


And next is a table taken from January 2009 top sellers as published by NPD on Edge Online:


Observations:

1) Half of 2010's top 10 are Wii titles, 4 out of the 5 published by Nintendo. So same old story about Nintendo topping the Wii charts. In 2009, 3 out of the 4 Wii titles were 1st party. In both 2009 and 2010 the single 3rd party Wii title was a Music/Dance game that sold between 150k and 200k units. But in 2009 the music game was Guitar Hero World Tour, whereas this year it was Just Dance. This does not prove the relative decline of guitar and rise of dance subgenres, but it certainly puts a somewhat significant drop in the evidence bucket of just that. Perhaps by the time Microsoft's Natal and Sony's Arc peripherals release for Holiday 2010, this year will be known as the one when dance resurged? Time will tell...

2) Zero PSP titles in 2009. Zeroo PSP titles in 2010. Is anyone surprised? But in 2009 there were two NDS titles. 2010 saw zero NDS titles. Neither the 4th quarters of 2008 or 2009 had major 1st party NDS launches, except perhaps Zelda Spirit tracks in Q4 2009. But the bigger issue is that NDS hardware sales in Jan 2010 were down by 17% from Jan 2009 with retail software down a similar %. Sure, digital sales on DSi could have made up some of that difference, but surely not enough. But here's the real burn with 2010's NDS software sales, the top 10 selling January 2010 DS SKUs sold more than the top 10 January 2009 DS SKUs. So the top titles took a larger share of a smaller pie on NDS. That's a bit scary for the handheld market, though if it is economy driven the question is will DS sales rebound if/when the overall economy rebounds this year?

3) Army of Two: The 40th Day, a sequel to a strong selling original IP, did not sell nearly the same amoun the original game did despite similar review scores (both low 70's). We've seen this lesson before, particularly with the True Crime series on PS2 and Xbox, that when marketing and other factors help sell a mediocre original IP it is very hard to sell more copies with the sequel unless you improve the game significantly. This isn't an iron clad rule with zero exceptions, but it is a pretty strong guideline. It should be noted that Mass Effect 2 (mid 90's), one of the top scoring games of this generation, outsold and outscored the original Mass Effect (low 90's) in their respective launch months.

4) Bayonetta, a well reviewed (upper 80's) core action game from SEGA that released on the same day as THQ's core action game Darksiders (low 80's) did not make the top 10. Even in core categories genres review score is never a 100% correlation to game sales. But word is Bayonetta sold much better relative to Darksiders and Army of Two 2 in Europe and Japan than it did in the US.

5) Finally, the top 10 of Jan 2010 sold about 3.6 million units while the top 10 of Jan 2009 sold 2.7 million units. That's an increase of 32%. Meanwhile, total dollars software sales in Jan 2010 (ie, all title...not just top 10) were down 13%. And total unit sales were also down 13%. So the top 10 total was up - waaay up - but the total sales for the month were waaay down.

Overall conclusions about 2010:
- Dance games will sell 8,000,000,000 units in 2010. Ok maybe not that many but the Dance subgenre of Music/Dance should be up over 2009 while pure Music games should be down. Not rocket science after what happened in 2009 but with Natal and Arc coming this isn't a dramatic prediction

- Sales are trending more hits driven with the core gamer driving sales. Also not a tough conclusion in the context of where we finished 2009.

- Speaking of core games, quality will matter even more than before as with games likethe EA/Bioware masterpiece Mass Effect 2. (I'm biased because I'm playing and loving it, and I generally avoid console RPGs like the plague.) Army of Two: 4oth Day sold relatively poorly as a sequel that did not dramatically improve the quality from the original. This point will be made clear when the February 2010 sales results come out in March showing how badly Dante's Inferno will have sold in its launch month despite EA's Superbowl, NBA All-Star game and overall TV ad budget. The ad did not fit the product because of the terrible music choice that may have resonated with 30-something women but likely not core gamers. And it was generally ill advised being placed in the Superbowl in the first place. The game itself, like both Army of Two games, was reviewed in the mid to low 70s. These days it's hard for a $10million+ US TV budget to save a game of that quality with no other intrinsic hooks/innovations around its premise/gameplay.