After more than 12 years of writing about console video games—ranging from game reviews to sales analysis—I am officially "retiring." I use quotation marks because I can't really retire from something that I didn't really do for a living… but it's been more than 25% of my life, and the time has come to hang up my keyboard and step away… for good, this time.
Pretty interesting—and sad—news coming out of Electronic Arts as the company has thrown in the towel on its college football video games after a twenty-year run that began back in 1993 as Bill Walsh College Football.
What a shame.
That's about all I can say about Microsoft's game-changing decisions regarding the Xbox One. It could have been worse, but the damage is pretty severe as it stands.
When I was growing up, my family didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t own a family console until my mom bought a Colecovision from a tag sale in 1987. Before that, my maternal grandmother’s Atari VCS was sometimes available in 1979 onward when we visited or even lived there due to money troubles. I did get a VIC-20 for my birthday in 1984 and then a Commodore 64 for my middle school graduation in 1986 from my paternal grandmother, but those weren’t so much game consoles as they were hybrid devices. I did own a few games for both systems, but not a significant amount.
If you listen to the social mediasphere, the Xbox One is dead already. If you listen to common sense, however, you'll realize that the battle is just beginning.
It's understandable to want to jump to conclusions based on Mr. Kato's statement above. Does this mean that Sony would dare to repeat its $600 miscalculation from 2006? Could this mean higher costs than expected at retail and potentially put off consumers? Does this open the door for Microsoft to undercut Sony out of the gate?
Speaking candidly, I don't believe that anyone was ready for the numbers that we saw from NPD for the month of April… regardless of whether you're an armchair analyst like myself or whether you're a top-line professional in this business. Hardware sales numbers, in particular, were just painful to digest. It wasn't a total collapse, but when you drop by more than 40% from the past year—and when that April's comp targets weren't crazy to begin with—it just looks awful.
In advance of this afternoon's release of NPD retail video game sales data for April, I wanted to compare my range projections with those of Michael Pachter from Wedbush Securities.
NPD sales data for April is set to arrive tomorrow (May 16th). I don't expect many surprises nor many changes to the status quo when it comes to hardware sales rankings for the month.
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