Consumers are switching off gaming if the latest US sales figures are anything to go by.According to NPD research, May US video game sales were the lowest for nearly five years. In Australia major retailers who sell games are reporting “slow” sales despite several new releases.
The most popular was LA Noire, which is set on the mean streets of 1940s Los Angeles.The game from publisher Take-Two and developer Rockstar Games sold 900,000 copies, after being released mid-month to become May’s best-selling title.
But it proved no match for Red Dead Redemption, the Rockstar game released a year earlier that sold more than 1.5m copies in comparison.
Analysts at Wedbush Morgan Securities told the Financial Times in the UK that LA Noire sales were below their estimates of 1m units and console software sales for May of $376m were down 19 per cent compared to a year ago and well below their forecasts of $465m. Sales were the lowest since October 2006, according to NPD.
Doug Creutz, video game analyst at Cowen and Company, said LA Noire accounted for around 40 per cent of the miss to his estimates of an 8 per cent decrease in monthly sales, as it fell short of his forecast of 1.26m units.
He said Take-Two is unlikely to do better in June with Duke Nukem Forever, a title released today that was nearly 15 years in the making (“If this was 15 years in the making, it makes you wonder what they did for the other 14 years and 10 months,” reads one typical review).
On the hardware side, home console unit sales were flat year-on-year, with the Xbox 360 leading, as it has done all year, with 270,000 units sold, the Wii in second on 236,000 and Sony selling 175,000 PS3s, up 14 per cent on a year ago.
