This Week in Gaming 2: The Number Game, Vol. 1

Welcome to Week 2 of This Week in Gaming, an experimental weekly blog where I round up and analyze the week's biggest gaming news as relates to the current-gen console wars.

The Big Stuff

The Consumer Electronics Show ran this week in Las Vegas. The biggest gaming news out of CES was probably Bill Gates’s Microsoft keynote. Along with touting the success of the Xbox 360, Gates and Robbie Bach announced a new upcoming service for the 360: IPTV. IPTV on the 360 will provide gamers the ability to stream television programming onto their TVs through their 360s and will also open the 360 up for digital video recording, picture-in-picture capabilities, and messaging friends while watching TV.

Speaking after his CES keynote, Bill Gates controversially followed in Sony’s footsteps, referring to Microsoft’s next-gen gaming machine as a computer rather than a console. As much as this statement has garnered laughs both when Gates said it and when Sony’s Ken Kutaragi said it of the PS3, the implications of these comments do very clearly mark the differences between what Sony and Microsoft are going for compared to Nintendo. Where the Wii has reached for a saccharine level of simplicity, to the point where they are turning away some hardcore gamers, Sony and Microsoft are very obviously trying to move towards their systems being all-in-one entertainment machines. Each have had varying levels of success so far, but if Microsoft and Sony have anything to say about it, Xbox v.3 and the PS4 will provide everything consumers want in entertainment – film, television, internet access, and, almost as an afterthought, gaming. As one friend of mine put it upon hearing news of the Microsoft keynote: “You thought Microsoft’s computer monopoly was a big deal? We ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Outside of CES, the biggest story this week was easily the NPD sales info for December. For those who don’t know, NPD (National Purchase Diary) is a group that collects information about purchase numbers each month and provides them to manufacturers and retailers. For gaming, this information includes hardware and software sales. There’s always a lot of controversy when the NPD data is released each month over how trustworthy NPD is, but the general consensus in the industry seems to be that they know their stuff. Certain big-name stores like Wal-Mart supposedly do not report to NPD, but the group is said to have very accurate formulae for approximating the number sold from places not reporting.

So what’s the big deal with December’s NPD? As might be expected from the holidays, hardware sales skyrocketed a whopping 59%. Game sales only went up 5%, but even if they didn’t have the games to play them, it looks like a lot of people were waking up to new systems under the tree. Last-gen’s Playstation 2 remained the best-selling console of the month, with the Xbox 360 close behind. As many predicted, the 360 was a popular choice for people looking for a next-gen system but unable to find Playstation 3s or Wiis. The continued popularity of the Playstation 2, along with its cheap price and steady stream of strong releases, may actually be harming the PS3 at this point. Whereas the Playstation 3 is still experiencing the normal drought of titles after its launch, the PS2 just had a huge group of releases in Fall 2006 and still has a lot of big titles coming, including Rogue Galaxy and God of War 2. There’s not a lot of incentive yet for the army of PS2 owners to upgrade to the next-gen Sony console, especially with the 360 costing less and the Wii offering completely new experiences.

Both the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP offered up impressive handheld sales – 1.6 million and 953,000 respectively. The continued popularity of the DS was expected, with some reports stating that they were as difficult to find at stores as the Wii. Perhaps more surprising was the PSP, which is selling quite strongly despite many continued complaints about its small library of desirable titles and weak design. At the very least, the PSP has gotten to the point in its popularity where it’s almost certain that Sony will continue in the handheld market.

As far as software goes, the top-selling title of the month was Madden NFL 07, proving as definitively as it ever has that it is not hardcore gamers buying the biggest-selling games. Certainly some hardcore gamers do play the Madden games, but for them to fill EA’s pockets the way they do, there’s a much wider audience being appealed to. Some other franchises that might be considered targeted to a more hardcore (if only slightly) crowd were also near the top, though: Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Call of Duty 3, and Need for Speed: Carbon were also in the top five, along with THQ’s Cars adaptation. NPD also released year-round numbers, which once again showed Madden NFL 07 as the top-selling game of the year. Close behind was New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS and Gears of War on the Xbox 360 – impressive spots for games released on a single platform compared to Madden, which is on every platform imaginable. The fast rise by Gears of War is great news for Microsoft, who obviously posited the game as a placeholder for the Halo franchise. It worked, and Microsoft can now be said to have two best-selling shooter franchises exclusive to their system, as well as a true killer app for the 360 finally.

The guys behind Famitsu revealed this week that the Japanese software market has jumped 125% in 2006. This is after several years of Japanese decline and could be good news for Japanese game developers, who have had to live with the reality of the poor Japanese economy for many years now. Eight of the top ten selling Japanese titles of 2006 were Nintendo DS titles. It’s no secret that the DS has become one of the hottest Japanese trends this year, but this just drills it in once more. Seeing news like this, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone to see even huge franchise games like Dragon Quest IX coming to the DS, though the PS2 still had the highest number of games (42) on the list. Also interesting was that of the next-gen systems, only the Wii made it into the top 100 games sold in 2006, with Wii Sports at number 21. No PS3 or Xbox 360 titles made it this year. The 360’s Japan struggles are well-documented, but perhaps the PS3 will have some troubles there also.

The Small Stuff

With the commercial success of the Wii and the DS over the holiday season, Nintendo has raised their expected profit forecast by 20%. In the fiscal year ending on March 31st, 2007, Nintendo expects to make $1.01 billion. Obviously there is something quite positive to be said for making money off of hardware sales right out of the gate.

Microsoft executive Peter Moore has confirmed that Microsoft has plans to bring video games to their Zune portable media player by summer 2008. The Zune, widely hyped as Microsoft’s “iPod killer”, has met with generally poor reception since its debut. According to the Gamasutra article I’ve linked to, Microsoft expects to sell 1 million Zunes by June 30th compared to 17 million iPods in the fourth quarter alone. It doesn’t seem likely that Zune’s gaming capabilities will actually compete with the DS or PSP; instead, it will probably just be able to play simple casual games like can now be downloaded from iTunes for the latest iterations of the iPod.

After lots of curiosity from fans, Microsoft revealed this week that they will be ignoring their 50MB Live Arcade size limit for upcoming PS1 port Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Previously, Microsoft has kept any Xbox Live Arcade releases below 50 MB so that users who bought the 360 Core version or otherwise didn’t have a hard drive could easily fit Arcade titles onto a 64 MB memory card. The much-anticipated release will be the first to break that rule, though Microsoft has said the rule will still be in place. They’re simply willing to make exceptions for the right games. Hopefully more high-end XBLA content will pop up as 2007 progresses.

Microsoft added to the good news about the 360’s holidays sales with several other impressive numbers. First off, again, Gears of War is an unabashed success, having sold 2.7 million copies in a mere eight weeks. There are 10.4 million total 360s shipped worldwide, just topping the number Microsoft promised they’d reach before the end of the year. Microsoft has also stated a goal of 6 million 360 users on Xbox Live by June 2007. They confirmed that they’re well on the way, having just surpassed the 5 million mark. The total attach rate of the 360 (number of games sold per console) has risen from 5.1 in October to 5.3 now. So what do all these numbers and statistics mean? Basically, things are looking up for the 360 heading into 2007. Microsoft has pulled out a seriously impressive number of “wins” at the start of the year, and they have a momentum that Sony currently lacks.

Soaring on the hype for their soon-to-be-released first expansion pack, World of Warcraft hit 8 million subscribers this week. This includes 2 million players in North America, 1.5 million in Europe, and 3.5 million in China. Seemingly becoming a more unbeatable behemoth every day, it will be interesting seeing how sales of expansion pack The Burning Crusade go – right now it appears to be one of the most anticipated expansions ever. The expansion hits stores next week, so I’ll keep an eye on it.

Despite the NPD numbers having revealed that Sony’s Playstation 3 has only sold 700,000 units since its launch, Sony confirmed at CES that they have shipped 1 million PS3s in the U.S. The timing for this announcement may not have been very keen for Sony, as it coincided with the NPD numbers and numerous reports of stacks of unsold PS3s in stores around the nation. The sense seems to be that the rush for the Playstation 3 has died down more or less altogether while people are still clamoring for a Nintendo Wii.

Anecdotal Evidence

With my work at Evil Avatar and on the Evil Avatar Radio podcast, I obviously come into contact with a lot of hardcore gamers. But I’m also a college student, a library employee, a comic shop worker, and generally a guy who likes to talk to a lot of people. Invariably this leads to discussions about gaming with people who aren’t hardcore gamers. This section is for talking about what the non-hardcore gamers in my life are thinking.

So I haven’t had too much contact with other people this week since winter break is still on, but tonight the girlfriend and I went to Local Movie Rental Facility. Movie Rental Place Employee #1 is an acquaintance from school. A few weeks earlier he’d run up to me in the student center to inform me that he’d been talked into buying a Wii and was officially on the lookout. As of this weekend, he remains on the lookout.

“I could buy a Wii right now, but I can’t even find one. I’m just going to wait until April or May, because they’re not even mass-producing them until February.” Not sure where that rumor got started. “Kudos to Nintendo, though. It’s about time they had a hit this big.” And about the PS3: “Sure, it’d be nice to have Final Fantasy 13. It’d be nice to have Kingdom Hearts 3. But they’re not even going to be around for at least a year and a half. There’s just not anything on the PlayStation 3 right now that appeals to me. I’ve got a friend who has one and he hardly plays it.”

The Wii myth among casual gamers just seems to keep building, and I expect that to continue until supply catches up with demand. Movie Rental Place Employee #1 also mentioned that he has friends looking for Wiis who have already purchased games for it, and he was considering doing the same. It’s really wild seeing that kind of devotion among people who are more or less casual gamers.

My Week in Gaming

Due to my 360 being shipped off for repairs – complete with a ludicrous 14-business-day wait for a repaired unit – my gaming this week has almost completely being taken up by my brand new PlayStation 3. Along with Resistance: Fall of Man (the only game I purchased for the PS3), I’ve been playing demos for Motorstorm and Lemmings. Even on my SDTV, Motorstorm is easily the most beautiful game I’ve ever seen. If the final version runs as smoothly as the demo and has lag-free multiplayer, it’s definitely going to be the next must-purchase title for the PS3.

Resistance: Fall of Man has impressed me a lot more than I expected. The single-player game, while far from revolutionary, is astoundingly solid. The campaign mixes together huge war battles akin to Call of Duty with linear solo shooting ala Half-Life 2. More fun yet is the online mode, which was absolutely nailed in every respect, despite worries about the PS3’s ability to do online gaming. There’s the obvious deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag modes, but there’s also a couple of interesting new modes. One of them especially, Meltdown, has proven to be quite addicting. This mode has two teams vying for control of nodes to help prevent their reactors from overheating, and it’s a blast. Destroying an enemy’s node at the last second of a match so that their sliver of reactor energy goes down just a little bit faster than yours is a complete and wonderful rush.

Resistance online also importantly offers a completely lag-free experience. Whether or not this will continue in future PS3 online titles remains to be seen, but it’s extremely nice here when you can enter a match with 40 other players and have no slow-down or jerkiness whatsoever. There’s also a complex ranking system that helps match you up to people in your same skill level and give you something to shoot for when gaming. It’s rare to find the “just one more level” mentality in a shooter, but that’s absolutely the feeling I had when I was playing Resistance at four in the morning this week. If nothing else, Resistance online proves that the potential for amazing online experiences is there in the PS3. It's just going to be up to Sony to continue producing games that put the potential to good use.

Alright, that's all I've got for you guys this week. As always, thanks for reading, and your comments are very appreciated. Either comment here or send e-mails to kefkataran@gmail.com. Hope to see you next week!