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November 2009 NPD Article (Gamasutra)

J

jvm

Gamasutra.
This morning Gamasutra posted some comments I had on the latest results announced by the NPD Group. You can read it here:
Direct link to Gamasutra story about November 2009 NPD data.
I was not able to get as much information this month as I have previously, but I tried to do a decent job with what I had. Things of interest:
  • How the Xbox 360 software share grew in November, while the Wii and NDS dropped. Sony's total share dropped overall, but the PS3 share grew.
  • Estimated top 10 YTD. We'll know final top 10 in a month, of course.
  • Why the industry will probably hit below $19.5 billion this year. (Compare to $21.3 billion in 2008.)
  • It's just mentioned offhand, but PC MW2 pulled in about 170K. I hadn't seen that mentioned elsewhere.

The software dollar marketshare graphs:
nov-08-est-sw-dist.png

nov-09-est-sw-dist.png


As always, I'm up for corrections, comments, etc. Please don't take a lack of immediate response personally -- I may simply not be here. My overlordseditors will probably be watching the thread, so changes may happen without a direct response from me.

Thanks, as always, guys.

In case you'd like to review previous threads:
2007: Oct Nov Dec
2008: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2009: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct
 
Wii is doing just fine. I thought the handheld market was bigger? (PS3 > NS :O)
*look at PSP in both charts*...
 
Jaruru said:
Wii is doing just fine. I thought the handheld market was bigger? (PS3 > NS :O)
*look at PSP in both charts*...
Click to expand...

It's revenue, which means the whole $60 vs. $30 price tag thing affects the metric.

EDIT: Beaten like a government mule.
 
jvm said:
[*]It's just mentioned offhand, but PC MW2 pulled in about 170K. I hadn't seen that mentioned elsewhere.
Click to expand...

Curious you know if that's including digital download and if so the ratios (which I'm guessing you probably weren't told). Wondering for a big title like MW2 what the ratios end up being in the US.
 
I'm halfway through the article, but:

In both September and August, that concept appeared to play out as the PS3 outsold the Xbox 360.
Click to expand...
Shouldn't it be September and October?

However, with over 1.2 million systems for the month, there is simply no reason to be bearish about the system's future. Look for Wii sales of around 2 million systems in November, which will again be healthy by anyone's standards.
Click to expand...
And December?

Thanks.
 
The problem I have with the revenue Pie Charts is that it is revenue, so an increase in unit sales for Xbox 360 and PS3 most likely will see a greater boost in the percentage over Wii. I know Wii sales dropped, but it certainly didn't drop as much as hardware did, if you think about it.

I imagine the huge boost in Xbox's software share was mostly due to MW2. I mean 4.2 million in a month is huge! I might be wrong, of course; there were quite a few XB360 games in the Top 20.
 
Cryect said:
Curious you know if that's including digital download and if so the ratios (which I'm guessing you probably weren't told). Wondering for a big title like MW2 what the ratios end up being in the US.
Click to expand...
That's just retail, from what I can tell. I have no idea what the online distribution (Steam) did. If I had to guess, I'd guess Steam outdid retail, but I could be wrong. I just think that MW2 and Steam populations overlap enough that you'd see strong sales there.
 
Ericsc said:
Wow, the PSP really doesn't sell much software.
Click to expand...
Don't forget, PSN sales (which is 100% of Go-owners, some 1000-3000) might explain some of the pathetic figure.
Yeah, the PSP really doesn't sell much software :(
 
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Wii isn't going to be #1 in NPD software (overall or 3rd party) in 2009, and, as a corollary, most of the industry-wide YoY drops can be easily explained by YoY decreases in Wii hardware and software.
 
wow, 360 really is a monster. not that it's not well deserved, but colour me surprised to see it overtake Wii in SW sales with such a wide margin. How about making some games, Nintendo?
 
farnham said:
shockingly low numbers for MW2 PC

because of the dedicated server thing..?
Click to expand...
Man, I wish. But it's more likely that it's simply the retail PC market in the US being pretty muted, it's not like over here in Europe.

Most of the gamers something like MW2 targets have switched over to digital downloads long ago, I'd say.
 
Sho_Nuff82 said:
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Wii isn't going to be #1 in NPD software (overall or 3rd party) in 2009, and, as a corollary, most of the industry-wide YoY drops can be easily explained by YoY decreases in Wii hardware and software.
Click to expand...
According to what I've seen, the drop in music game revenue is approximately 2/3 of the software revenue difference between last year and this year. While I think the Wii was an important platform for music games last year, I don't think it was all of it. (Note: I really don't know specifics. Sometimes I have more information than I can print, but this is not one of those cases.)

However, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 were the only platforms to increase revenue yoy in November. (And, IIRC, in October too.) So whatever they've lost in music revenue they've made up elsewhere.

It's such a multidimensional problem, really. For each platform you have software unit sales and average software prices. On top of that, you can divide into genres on a platform or across platforms, and then again look at unit and price figures within or across those categories.

Given the amount of information we have to work with, it's simply too hard to make very strong statements. Sure wish we had more.
 
One interesting note is that Microsoft is on its way to become the biggest platform owner in terms of software revenue:

DS + Wii = 40% (down from 47% in 2008)
PS2 + PSP + PS3 = 23% (down from 25% in 2008)
Xbox 360 = 37% (up from 28% in 2008)

this puts Microsoft into a breathing distance of 3% from Nintendo. Looking at the future game roadmaps of both, it seems that Microsoft has a much bigger amount of heavy hitters outlined for 2010 than Nintendo.
 
jvm said:
According to what I've seen, the drop in music game revenue is approximately 2/3 of the software revenue difference between last year and this year. While I think the Wii was an important platform for music games last year, I don't think it was all of it. (Note: I really don't know specifics. Sometimes I have more information than I can print, but this is not one of those cases.)

However, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 were the only platforms to increase revenue yoy in November. (And, IIRC, in October too.) So whatever they've lost in music revenue they've made up elsewhere.

It's such a multidimensional problem, really. For each platform you have software unit sales and average software prices. On top of that, you can divide into genres on a platform or across platforms, and then again look at unit and price figures within or across those categories.

Given the amount of information we have to work with, it's simply too hard to make very strong statements. Sure wish we had more.
Click to expand...

Revenue would be down due to the lack of people buying the big boxes, surely? I'd imagine a large majority of people who plan to buy plastic instruments have already got a set by now.

The thing is that people decry the death of the music game, when realistically they're making a ton of money off of downloadable music every single week.
 
jvm said:
According to what I've seen, the drop in music game revenue is approximately 2/3 of the software revenue difference between last year and this year. While I think the Wii was an important platform for music games last year, I don't think it was all of it. (Note: I really don't know specifics. Sometimes I have more information than I can print, but this is not one of those cases.)

However, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 were the only platforms to increase revenue yoy in November. (And, IIRC, in October too.) So whatever they've lost in music revenue they've made up elsewhere.

It's such a multidimensional problem, really. For each platform you have software unit sales and average software prices. On top of that, you can divide into genres on a platform or across platforms, and then again look at unit and price figures within or across those categories.

Given the amount of information we have to work with, it's simply too hard to make very strong statements. Sure wish we had more.
Click to expand...
Correct. From another Gamasutra article a few months ago:

ytd-music-revenue-sep-09.png


Rlan said:
The thing is that people decry the death of the music game, when realistically they're making a ton of money off of downloadable music every single week.
Click to expand...
Again, from the same article the graph above is from:

The one part of the business that we cannot see directly is the revenue that comes in from the sale of songs and song packs through each game's online store. At the moment Rock Band has the larger catalog of songs and has recently touted over 60 million downloads since the launch of the first Rock Band.

Even at $2 per song, the additional $120 million in revenue over the last two years doesn't come close to offsetting the drop in retail revenue just in 2009.
Click to expand...
 
Chittagong said:
One interesting note is that Microsoft is on its way to become the biggest platform owner in terms of software revenue:

DS + Wii = 40% (down from 47% in 2008)
PS2 + PSP + PS3 = 23% (down from 25% in 2008)
Xbox 360 = 37% (up from 28% in 2008)

this puts Microsoft into a breathing distance of 3% from Nintendo. Looking at the future game roadmaps of both, it seems that Microsoft has a much bigger amount of heavy hitters outlined for 2010 than Nintendo.
Click to expand...

True.. but I guess Nintendo is still printing money since every Wii makes a nice profit (probably 1-2 games?).

360 really is doing great and doing better every year. MS have played this game very well (and very hard). I wonder what will happen next gen?
 
360 LTD = 1.77x PS3 LTD

360 Nov Software Revenue Share = 1.94x PS3.

Wii LTD = 2.39x PS3 LTD

Wii Nov Software Revenue Share = 1.53x PS3

Given that comparison, I don't where all the hullabaloo over PS3 software comes from. Whatever about unit sales, PS3 owners certainly spent almost as much as their 360 counterparts, and significantly more than their Wii brethern. If 360 software is considered strong per user, you can't really consider PS3's 'weak' for this month.
 
farnham said:
shockingly low numbers for MW2 PC

because of the dedicated server thing..?
Click to expand...

I'm not shocked. It's a console game nowadays. through and through.

besides, Steam numbers would probably be close to the retail figures.


edit:

@Gofreak. Most of the negative PS3 software talk around Gaf lately has been around disappointing sales for first party games like Killzone 2 and Uncharted 1 & 2. But, overall, PS3 gamers still pick up the big third party games just like their 360 owning counterparts (AC1 & 2, MW2, GTA)
 
gofreak said:
360 LTD = 1.77x PS3 LTD

360 Nov Software Revenue Share = 1.94x PS3.

Wii LTD = 2.39x PS3 LTD

Wii Nov Software Revenue Share = 1.53x PS3

Given that comparison, I don't where all the hullabaloo over PS3 software comes from. Whatever about unit sales, PS3 owners certainly spent almost as much as their 360 counterparts, and significantly more than their Wii brethern. If 360 software is considered strong per user, you can't really consider PS3's 'weak' for this month.
Click to expand...

You're correct. And this was an "off" month, for PS3, normally the ratio is slightly more in its favor. The high sales of Modern Warfare 2 on 360 skewed things this month.
 
EagleEyes said:
Publishers don't care about ratio. They care about how many games they sell, period. Thats Sony's problem that they are only in half the homes of the 360 in NA.
Click to expand...

I'm not speaking about how the publishers view things. I'm talking about the tired, and false, meme that states: "PS3 owners don't buy games."
 
estimated-top-10-ytd-v2.png


Can anyone think of any games that are likely to knock off Madden from this list? NSMBWii is likely to jump up a couple of spots with December sales, but I can't think of any other games that are close to 1.4 million and still selling significantly enough to get past that threshold.
 
pslong009 said:
estimated-top-10-ytd-v2.png


Can anyone think of any games that are likely to knock off Madden from this list? NSMBWii is likely to jump up a couple of spots with December sales, but I can't think of any other games that are close to 1.4 million and still selling.
Click to expand...

Second month of L4D2.
 
people saying xbox360 is a software monster. Yes it is.. but isn't it modern warfare2? There's 4 million units of that in there and the title is a multiplatform.
 
Hmm... interesting read as usual. :)

I have a question/doubt though: isn't the revenue pie-chart comparison somehow skewed due to the enormous success of Modern Warfare 2 this year?
EDIT: beaten about this maybe, but my doubt still stands

For example, on the 360 last november we had Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty WAW in the top10 which, combined, sold less than MW2 alone on the same platform!
 
LCfiner said:
@Gofreak. Most of the negative PS3 software talk around Gaf lately has been around disappointing sales for first party games like Killzone 2 and Uncharted 1 & 2. But, overall, PS3 gamers still pick up the big third party games just like their 360 owning counterparts (AC1 & 2, MW2, GTA)
Click to expand...

While it's true that a lot such discussion centers around 'hit' performance on PS3 and whether it's as hit driven as other consoles, there's nearly always parallel arguments going on about 'PS3 owners not buying enough software' or talk about blu-ray player only-PS3s etc. People extrapolating from first party or 'hit' performance to draw conclusions about the overall software situation.

And while it's true that PS3 owners did spend a little less on software in Nov than 360 owners, for example, it's not that far behind. If 360 is considered amazing, then the PS3 spend on games seems quite healthy. And in the even bigger picture when you incorporate Wii, it compares very well...

Folks need to stop looking at the top 20 and trying to draw conclusions about overall relative software performance from that. It's just not very telling about the overall picture.

EagleEyes said:
Publishers don't care about ratio. They care about how many games they sell, period. Thats Sony's problem that they are only in half the homes of the 360 in NA.
Click to expand...

I don't think there is a problem there. It seems Sony's offered fairly consistently a 40-50+% 'extra' in terms of software market above and beyond 360 in NA. Given the cost of ports between the HD consoles, 40-50% more beyond just 360 makes PS3 support a no-brainer. Even more so once you factor in Europe (and Japan also for Japanese pubs), where the additional share on offer via PS3 WW can be significantly higher. I think they're quite happy with this situation, and I think that's reflected in the ps3/360/pc porting circle most of the industry has going on.
 
gofreak said:
Given that comparison, I don't where all the hullabaloo over PS3 software comes from. Whatever about unit sales, PS3 owners certainly spent almost as much as their 360 counterparts, and significantly more than their Wii brethern. If 360 software is considered strong per user, you can't really consider PS3's 'weak' for this month.
Click to expand...

99% of the problem is how we get our data. Numbers only come from the top ten so they cut out anything selling on a smaller install base or that sells over time instead of "day 1". It's pretty much tailor made to cause people to claim that the 360 is a "software monster".

If, instead, we got a top 5 per platform or something then we would have a much more even picture of sales.
 
Parl said:
Modern Warfare 2 was probably a nice chunk of that. Same with PS3.
Click to expand...

Easy to calculate.

360
- Total software sales for Nov 2009 was $1.406B.
- Xbox 360 accounted for 37% of software revenue, equaling $520M dollars.
- Gamasutra estimates that the 4.2M copies of MW2 brought in ~$260M (average price of $62)
- MW2 accounted for 50% of 360 software sales

PS3
- Total software sales for Nov 2009 was $1.406B.
- PS3 accounted for 19% of software revenue, equaling $267M dollars.
- MW2 sold 1.87M copies on PS3. Using the 360 version's average price of $62, you get a revenue of $116M for MW2 (PS3)
- MW2 accounted for ~43% of PS3 software sales


Also, 1 in 4 dollars spent on game software in November was spent on a version of Modern Warfare 2.
 
lowlylowlycook said:
99% of the problem is how we get our data. Numbers only come from the top ten so they cut out anything selling on a smaller install base or that sells over time instead of "day 1". It's pretty much tailor made to cause people to claim that the 360 is a "software monster".

If, instead, we got a top 5 per platform or something then we would have a much more even picture of sales.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is what I'm saying in my second reply. The top x charts aren't telling of the overall situation.

I figured this was already obvious, but it seems enough people still fall into this trap.

kswiston's stat re. MW2 is also interesting. In terms of charting for example, if PS3's userbase is indeed less hit-driven as stats like that suggest, that + the absolute userbase size disadvantage would only further skew charts away from giving a truer picture of how the pie is split overall.
 
gofreak said:
While it's true that a lot such discussion centers around 'hit' performance on PS3 and whether it's as hit driven as other consoles, there's nearly always parallel arguments going on about 'PS3 owners not buying enough software' or talk about blu-ray player only-PS3s etc. People extrapolating from first party or 'hit' performance to draw conclusions about the overall software situation.

And while it's true that PS3 owners did spend a little less on software in Nov than 360 owners, for example, it's not that far behind. If 360 is considered amazing, then the PS3 spend on games seems quite healthy. And in the even bigger picture when you incorporate Wii, it compares very well...

Folks need to stop looking at the top 20 and trying to draw conclusions about overall relative software performance from that. It's just not very telling about the overall picture.
Click to expand...


yup, I agree with you. PS3 software sales are just fine. But, gaf being gaf, a lot of posts tend to focus on the first party games and that perception trickles down to thinking that all sales are subpar.

Pretty sure that GT5 and GoW3 software sales will help out that perception.



And, yeah, that 360 software revenue month is highly dependent on MW2, as others have said. I am curious what that pie will look like for all of 2009, not just November. Not saying 360 will do poorly, just that this month was lopsided with those 4.2 million MW2 copies sold.
 
In addition to MW2 there is also a app. 20% gap in price (not including the 20.00 WiiFit+, which I guess is offset by the Balance board version).

I t also looks like PS2 owners are moving to the 360/PS3 finally.

That should help Wii since hopefully developers won't make software to run on both systems anymore.
 
Great read as always jvm, but just one more minor correction from pg 4:
"We also note that the Pokémon title for the Nintendo DS is a rerelease of a pair of titles originally released in 2008."

The pair was actually released in 2007.
 
Excellent point about music software, and it does make the most sense. The fall of GH/RB would probably hit the Wii the hardest, especially in revenue.

Found this interesting as well:

While we are not privy to the number of Xbox 360 systems bundled with the Modern Warfare 2, we can observe that the average price of Microsoft's system appears to have seen a significant increase in its average selling price in November.

That suggests that consumers were buying the Modern Warfare 2 bundles and possibly a higher proportion of the $300 Xbox 360 Elite systems
Click to expand...
, the ones geared for online gaming out-of-the-box.[/QUOTE]

For all of the banned users from this month's NPD thread, there's your answer.

Moder Warfare 2 was a system seller.

Given that the Xbox 360 version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 brought in at least $260 milllion by our estimates, all of the growth of Microsoft's software revenue can be attributed to its commitment to making the Xbox 360 the platform most associated with the best-selling game of the year.
Click to expand...

GAF complains when MS gives multiplats the spotlight at E3, but the market consistently bears out that consumers don't care about whether a game is exclusive or not, if it's a game they desperately want to play they'll either try to find the system it's advertised on or the system all their friends are buying it for.

As for the YTD top 10, I know we don't have official numbers, but I'm really surprised that neither UFC 09 or RE5 (360 skus) came close to Madden's numbers with many more months on sale.

2010 looks to be quite interesting. Both the Wii and PS3 are entering the new year with price drops, so they should be up YoY in the first 3 months. Also, as seen in the thread on GAF, big software releases have never been so crammed into this particular quarter in years past. We may see a record-setting Jan-March in terms of software (led by Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and God of War), and that should be a good sign of growth going forward.
 
Sho_Nuff82 said:
As for the YTD top 10, I know we don't have official numbers, but I'm really surprised that neither UFC 09 or RE5 (360 skus) came close to Madden's numbers with many more months on sale.
Click to expand...
First, remember that this was just our best estimates. It is possible that we got it wrong (and NPD has contacted me when that's happened before).

That said, I estimate that RE5 was around 1.0-1.1mm by mid-year, based on data I've seen. I don't think it went much higher than 1.3mm through November, but I don't have any current figures.

I can't prove UFC 09 isn't around 1.4mm, but I can prove that the ones listed are higher than NSMBW ... and thus they're on the list.

@Ondore: Fixed!
 
cant we have top 10 for each platform... just to see the order.. It will be very nice.
and second do we know the breakdown of Halo 3: ODST numbers in September, Oct, November Sales.?
 
Seeing that graph for hardware between nov 08 and 09 really puts things into perspective on both Wii and PS3. That drop for Wii is pretty crazy.
 
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