Mar 2010 NPD Recap

To celebrate tax day in the US, NPD conveniently released March industry sales data and the usual websites (such as IndustryGamers) were kind enough to publish the basic results. To recap, here is the top ten from March 2010:As reported, here were key facts NPD released:

• Total industry sales (HW+SW) grew by 6% to $1.52 billion. Nice.
• Software sales grew by 10% to $875.3 million
• Hardware sales fell by 18% to $440.5 million

And here is a reprint of what NPD released about March 2009:

Observations:
1) As with Feb 2010, no PSP title made it into the March 2010 top 10 titles. No surprise here and this will probably the last month I mention this.

2) March has become a key Pokemon release month.

3) Four of the Mar 2010 top 10 slots are PS3 titles, including two first party games (God of War III and MLB '10: The Show).

4) The concentration ratio (formerly "concentration percentage"...see last month's wrap-up) for March 2010 was 31% vs. 25% for March 2009. In other words, the 10 ten video game software title unit sales in March 2010 were 31% of total video game software sales, compared to 25% the year prior. Interestingly, March 2009 had a similar good showing from core titles, mainly in Resident Evil 5, Halo Wars and Killzone 2 whereas March 2010 had God of War III, Bad Company 2 and Final Fantasy MMXIII (or possibly just XIII). Combined with the lower showing for Wii games in general, this gives another indication that the core gamer is leading the growth in the games sector right now, especially without much noise coming from the guitar and music category of games lately.

5) As with March 2009, no Call of Duty game appeared in the top 10 for March 2010. This is important because is another small indicator that the now annualized Call of Duty brand, despite alternating between developers Infinity Ward and Treyarch, the sales decay curves are somewhat similar for each iteration in the series once out of holiday. Modern Warfare 2's first two months (Nov/Dec 2009) were larger than the launch of Modern Warfare, World at War and Call of Duty 3 combined, but dropped immensely in January and stayed flat into February. While sales of MW2 are now declining its still going to clear hundreds of thousands of units across all platforms for at least another month and have a long tail larger than just about every game this generation, at least until the next CoD game this fall.

But so what? This gets us to the bigger question of what is going to happen to the Call of Duty brand given what's happened with the Infinity Ward studio heads getting fired and then forming Respawn and subsequently attracting over a dozen of IW's key talent. Call of Duty is the one of the most powerful brands in the industry and each year millions of gamers buy it on that brand name (and supporting marketing) alone. The IW shakeup probably will not negatively impact Treyarch's Nov 2010 release in the series. We'll never really know anyway, but the big question is what happens to Modern Warfare 3 which most people assume the remaining Infinity Ward will release in November 2011. Without the core design team from recent Call of Duty games, the probability that the next game will be as good is slightly lower. It's not guaranteed to be bad, but those staff losses can potentially hurt. If Treyarch's game this year sells worse than World at War, the brand overall will lose some momentum.

However, the biggest obstacle the Call of Duty brand will face outside of organic brand fatigue will be direct competition, particularly from whatever Respawn creates. While it is possible Respawn could come out with a game for holiday 2011 to compete directly with Modern Warfare 3, it is more likely their first game will take a little more time to create given they are just getting their studio off the ground and are going not going to rush a game out. The risk for Modern Warfare 3 will then merely be the thunder Respawn will steal away when the announce something. Most likely Respawn and its publishing partner, EA...erm... Partners, will understand that given the current core gamer sentiment favoring Jason West and Vince Zempella and general vitriol for Activision over what has happened, they will have an easy time finding sympathetic and interested press to cover what they are up to in any and all ways. And when they do ship a game, consider that Jason and Vince have attracted the all the design leads from IW, some of whom date back to Medal of Honor and all them at least to Call of Duty 2. Given that this group of designers has yet to make a bad game and now they will have even more freedom to make the game that they want, there is a very, very strong chance it will be excellent. That is the biggest long term threat the Call of Duty brand will face.