The extra prevalence of the NA market comes from a single language and two nations, instead of the convoluted langauge and beaurocracies of Europe, making it easier to target, and the prevalence of US developers producing what can be considered Hollywood style mass-interest titles that are adopted so readily across the globe, unlike some particular tastes of European or Japanese content that aren't so readily adaopted in other markets. Thus "owning" the Japanese market may win Japanese developers, but that content won't necessarily get you lots of sales in Europe and NA, whereas "owning" NA and securing those developers will certainly see significant content sales in Europe. That's why doing badly in NA isn't good, as you can't afford to lose those developers, but that's happening this gen. Everyone's suitable established that no platform is getting dropped any time soon. Hence the discussion seems pretty moot to me.
Aye, that's why I made a point of English speaking countries making up the most significant portion of all console related revenue in one of my previous posts. Other than Mexico and a small portion of Canada (French speaking part of Quebec), NA is a solid block that is easy to market to and easy to develope for, with potential to net the greatest ROI. Throw in the UK, Australia and New Zealand and it makes it even easier to target that first. And for developers and publishers, it's a good thing that Western Europe shares many similar desires for games, even if they also have their own specific tastes (racing being more popular there for example) as then it's a much simpler job of language translation to bring in more revenue.
That versus tailoring games for non-English speaking countries and then hoping it does well in English speaking countries via language translation. Which can be successful, but is more of a gamble.
It also helps that, not only is the US a large base of relatively homogenous consumers but also spends more per person on gaming than any other country or region except perhaps Japan.
Although if our government has anything to do about it, they'll try to tax that habit out of us.
Apparantly software revenue now is identical to 2007, isn't that a little troublesome?
It depends. It's troublesome for Nintendo and Sony overall as Wii, NDS, PS2 and PSP all saw declines in software revenue.
Microsoft is fine as the X360 had, I believe, an 8% gain in software revenue YoY. The PS3, I believe also had about an 8% YoY increase in revenue, but that is somewhat countered by the losses in revenue from the PS2 and PSP.
As well, NPD is estimating that when you included digital downloads, used game sales, rentals, subscriptions, DLC, social network games and mobile games apps. that it's relatively even. The problem here is that the NPD numbers for total games (all platforms) spending is about 9 billion USD lower than the estimate of that PDF that Zed linked in the European console thread.
24.7 billion in the PDF compared to NPD's 15.4-15.6 billion for NPD. And NPD is attempting to estimate Game Rentals and Used Games which the other report isn't.
But that just shows that once you get to relying on surveys which is the source for NPDs non-phyical games estimates, and ALL of the estimates for the Newzoom PDF you're going to get different numbers based on who you are surveying, what questions your asking on your survey, how your questions are structured, what your sample size is, etc...
So the only definitive number we have is physical games sales from NPD.
Once you get beyond that, well, it's all about how you do your surveys and who you survey. Either the numbers for Newzoo are greatly inflated, or NPD is greatly underestimating the impact of digital download, MMO subscriptions, social network game spending (facebook, popcap, etc.), mobile games apps, etc...
I suspect the Newzoo numbers are greatly inflated as it's collating data from the "National Gamers Surveys." If the people they are surveying are predominantly gamers who are more likely to buy more games, that's going to skew the numbers greatly when expanded to a country as a whole. And it'll skew numbers in countries that spend less per capita on games than it does for countries that spend more per capita on games. So numbers for France, for example, would probably be more inflated than the same numbers for the US.
Regards,
SB
