All purpose Sales and Sales Rumours and Anecdotes [2024 edition]

[Caayn]

I'm more surprised that It Takes Two and Need for speed Heat are in the top 10 games sold of february 2024

 

[pharma]

April 3, 2024

PC Top 2023 Games a Decade Old on Average; PC Drove Growth in 2023, Console Will 2024 Onward

A snapshot of the PC and console gaming market in 2023 shows an industry battling against its own past successes.

wccftech.com

Market research and data tracking firm NewZoo has released their 2023 PC and Console Gaming Report, and it provides an interesting snapshot of an industry in a bit of a transitional mode. The gaming industry saw out-of-control growth during the pandemic, which fizzled a bit in 2022, but 2023 saw a return to modest growth with the PC/console market reaching $93.5 billion, up 2.3 percent year-on-year. This growth was largely driven by the PC market, which was up 3.9 percent year-on-year, while the console market was up 1.7 percent YoY. The PC market accounted for 43 percent of industry revenue, while consoles were 57 percent.
...
Interestingly, one of the challenges the industry faces going forward is its own past successes. Basically, every new game that comes out has to compete with existing live service behemoths like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. This is particularly true on PC, where the average age of 2023’s top 10 games in terms of monthly active users was a whopping 9.6 years. PlayStation and Xbox don’t fare all that much better, with their top 10s being 7.4 and 7.2 years old on average. Seemingly the only place people actually play new games is the Switch, which has two 2023 games in its top 5 (Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder) and an average age of 3.9 years for its top 10.
...
Overall, games over 6 years old accounted for over 60 percent of playtime in 2023. Even in cases where new games were being played, a lot of time went to annualized franchises like Call of Duty and EA’s various sports games. A mere 8 percent of play time went to entirely new, non-annualized games, with Diablo IV, Hogwarts Legacy, and Baldur’s Gate III topping the list.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Activision Blizzard boosts Microsoft earnings, but Xbox console sales plummet

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has contributed to a boost in gaming revenue, but Xbox console sales hav…

www.eurogamer.net

Hardware revenue, however, has decreased by 31 percent year-on-year due to poor sales of Xbox consoles. Even the release of major exclusive Starfield last year couldn't improve hardware sales.

It's a similar story to this time last year, when the company also reported a 30 percent drop in hardware revenue.

Series is therefore tracking well below Xbox One?

 

[chris1515]

Activision Blizzard boosts Microsoft earnings, but Xbox console sales plummet

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has contributed to a boost in gaming revenue, but Xbox console sales hav…

www.eurogamer.net

Series is therefore tracking well below Xbox One?

Yes this is below Xbox One.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Not much of a surprise really.

 

[eastmen]

Not much of a surprise really.

They really need to drop prices. I expect the S to drop at the june show case and maybe the x also.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Not much of a surprise really.

Really? I thought it'd at least maintain current momentum. Sales curve has peaked much earlier than other consoles, and reflects really badly that instead of growing their platform generation over generation, MS are in a taildive. Beginning of this gen we were looking at Series doing better than One and One being a bad gen, a bunch of painful mistakes that MS were recovering from. So this gen should be better than last, selling lockstep 2:1 behind PS5, but it's fumbling hard. And at this point, it'd take something extraordinary to turn that around and get significant growth again.

I don't think anyone was expecting this three years ago, so I'm not sure why this isn't surprising. Were you expecting MS's hardware sales to keep dropping?