Third Party Publishers Hurt by Nintendo’s Success

Hadrian

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Original article

"The April NPD numbers have finally been released, and it looks like Nintendo has been performing all the right moves.

The company sold a combined 831,000 Nintendo DS and Wii units over the monthly period with an estimated 63% of total Wii games and 79% of all DS games sold developed by Nintendo themselves. Yet Nintendo’s success has come at the expense of many third-party publishers who depend on the younger demographic for a huge chunk of their monthly revenue.

Take for example Electronic Arts, whose sales fell an estimated 44% to $37.9 million in monthly revenue. EA’s Medal of Honor: Vanguard for the PlayStation 2 and Wii sold only 56,000 units combined, while only 53,000 copies of Tiger Woods PGA Tour for the Wii were sold. Indeed, Pacific Crest’s Evan Wilson stated that a recent "shift in interest to Nintendo products has clearly stolen share from third-party games across all platforms." He continued, "This has had the greatest effect on Electronic Arts due to its size."

Other companies that saw a slide in software revenue included Take-Two Interactive, which had a 54.5 percent decrease in sales ending at $19.8 million. THQ suffered a 27.6 percent fall to 13.4 million for the period.

According to UBS analyst Benjamin A. Schachter, “A key to the successes of many publishers during the last console cycle was market share gains at the expense of first-party publishers. We are concerned that this cycle may revert somewhat back to greater share gains for the first-party players, particularly as Nintendo rebounds and Microsoft focuses on and improves its AAA titles."


Of course the reason for this is that Nintendo makes better games than all of those, THQ make dire games and they mostly have to rely on a kiddy franchise to sell games. Also other publishers are just porting PS2 & PSP titles to the Wii and Wii owners want ORIGINAL titles that can only be played on a console like Wii. It also doesn't help the fact that most 3rd party Wii titles get below average ratings in reviews. The lesson 3rd part publishers has to be SPEND MORE THAN 4 MONTHS ON A GAME AND CATER TO THE CONSOLES AUDIENCE!
 

Darkforce

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Well if third parties like EA had jumped on the Wii bandwagon sooner instead of critising the machine they may have had some time to develop a good game or two and enjoy the same sucess Nintendo has been having. They've only recently become interested in the console these past few months now everyone is buying one so suprise suprise any 'joe public' buying a Wii right now has a choice of several exclusive first party titles or a bunch of crap third party ports, what's he gonna choose? EA and other companies only have themselves to blame.

smile.gif
 

Sc4rFac3d

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It's actually kinda pathetic to see all the 3rd parties hop on the Wii wagon right now when they first were just porting crap over. Maybe now they'll actually start doing shit. :/ I still doubt it though.
 

FAST6191

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I would just like to say medal of honor has gone downhill since the first one and tiger woods was released in late march was it: unless a game is outstanding I really do not see sales continuing for that long.
Also April = start of summer, summer = drop in games sales (or at least it has for the last 17 odd years I have been playing games).
Usual statistical nonsense I say.
 

iza

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game sales always drop in summer... think i'm going to be buying many games this summer when gas is skyrocketting? i'd rather put that 40-50 bucks in a tank of gas in either the car or the jet ski's....
 

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