Third Party Publishers Hurt by Nintendo’s Success
via Advanced Media Network
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."
