Sony Posts its numbers

Outside of Japan, Sony will have to do something special to capture mindshare.

The standard, "well make it more it powerful and boast about it!" that Sony usually does with it's consoles doesn't translate well to handhelds.

 

I don't think they will go that route only. Kaz is not Kutaragi. As a whole, Sony has evolved quite a bit (See Blu-ray, Qriocity), but there are yet more to do.

There is also Apple to consider, for Nintendo too !

 

Yeah I quess my point mainly was that the marketshare numbers for one publisher are going to be extremely volatile due to their releases being few and far between. A huge game release like Metal Gear is going to make the pie chart look completely different. I'm sure It'll be the same if PSP 2 gets its big Metal Gear game.

 

I see. If that's the point, bringing up another hardware will confuse the picture. To simplify the discussion, none of the partial look -- country/region, hardware, publisher, gender, etc. -- will give us the full picture.

 

Capcom also does a breakdown by units shipped (last page) and at least they include number of titles as well.

 

PS3 sold about 1M more software this year than 360, in US, Europe and Japan combined. About 7M less than Wii though.

 

OK this starts to make things slightly more interesting...

Data for 1H FY2010 (half ending 31/03/2010)

Sales for games came to 534,162,561 USD for 2 quarters.

PS3 (21.6%) - 115,379,113 USD
X360 (13.6%) - 72,646,108 USD

It is unfortunate that there is no breakdown for 2H FY2010 as the financial numbers are out. As well for the comparative half previous the ratio was more even. As well the predicted data for comparative half next (1H FY2011) has the ratio going back closer to to even.

Again, one of the smaller players in the market. Combined numbers for 2 quarters of PS3+X360 at least comes close to 1 quarter of Take Two. And even then Capcom itself notes that the numbers for this half are a bit of an aberration.

Also according to Their Annual Fiscal report for 2010 - http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/data/pdf/annual/2010/annual_2010_01.pdf

From page 30.

Page 31 shows marketshare for the various companies. Interestingly enough it doesn't show names for NA. But does illustrate how other than Nintendo, most of the Japanese publishers are quite minor players outside of Japan. Predictably, EA, Activision and UBIsoft have the lions share of the non-Nintendo sales.

Showing that Capcom is a relatively minor player.

Sega for 1H FY 2011 (date ending 30/09/2010) - http://www.segasammy.co.jp/english/pdf/release/2q_tanshin_hosoku_20101029_e_final.pdf

Taking a look at Sega, as the Capcom FY 2010 annual report shows them in 6th in terms of game related revenue in Europe at least.

It's interesting to note they did poorly in Japan (18.8%) and better in NA (48.5%) and Europe (32.6%). *rounding errors and errors in the Sega Report means it doesn't add up to 100%* Anyway, this should be more interesting as they do seem to sell far more software than either Capcom or Konami.

Their 2Q results appear worse than Capcom but that's deceiving as the numbers above are for Capcom's 1H which includes the holiday season (Oct - March) while 1H Sega is the slow season (Apr. - Sept.)

Anyway, 1H FY2011 is 469,660,141 USD

PS3 (9.3%) - 43,678,393 USD
X360 (8.7%) - 40,860432 USD

A few interesting notes from Sega. Projected numbers for full year FY2011 has PS3 at 14.9% and X360 at 15.7%. So Sega is expecting the X360 to do much better over the holiday season.

Second interesting note. Once again another company does quite a bit better on PSP (17.1%) than DS (6.2%).

Third interesting note. Wii sales have fallen off a cliff for Sega. F1/2010 is 20.4% of Sega's home games sales while F1/2011 is only 5.2%.

It might or might not be. But no actual proof has been shown. It appears to be far more likely from financial reports I've seen that it's either relatively equal or with a slight advantage to X360. Especially when the biggest world wide Japanese publisher shows relatively even sales between X360 and PS3. This also assumes that other Japanese pubs more closely follow the split from Konami than Sega or traditional Capcom numbers. As well that it's an extremely large divide to make up the lead X360 has from the western devs.

It doesn't help that Capcom is not expecting the PS3 to continue to do so well against X360. They are predicting sales will go back toward what it used to be as that one aberrant half was due to many Western friendly titles being delayed.

Regards,
SB

PS - Hmmm, I should go back to my original post and try to indicate which numbers were just partial Fiscal Years as well as which quarters are being shown. Probably be interesting if I aligned quarters for various companies as the 1Q or 1H for various companies don't align, thus single quarter numbers and single half numbers can be deceptive, as the Capcom and Sega numbers in this post show quite well. Bleh too much work.

 

It only takes a bit of pixel counting to get numbers.

 

And in case anyone still doubts poor PSP software sales.

 

Which is hardly accurate not to mention those charts only track reported + projected sales from the UK, Germany, NA (possibly US only), France, Spain, and Japan. Again, a combination of reported and projected/extrapolated numbers.

Versus absolute numbers as legally reported by the various companies involved. Numbers that they are accountable for and could potentially be sued for if numbers are misreported.

In the face of no numbers, the ones provided in the Nintendo report are interesting and useful. But certainly do not compare to actual hard numbers contained in company financials.

Just as we tend to trust console hardware numbers as reported by Sony/MS/Nintento versus console hardware numbers which are extrapolated from various sales tracking entities in a handful of countries.

Regards,
SB

 

I'm sure the numbers are accurate, else Nintendo wouldn't use them. Nintendo can verify obviously with their own numbers and confirm. And these are actual sales, not shipped copies which may still be unsold 12 months later, as reported by most publishers.

 

you're counting pixels on a graph and claiming accuracy to within 1%...?

 

It's not that the numbers aren't accurate, it is that the range of countries is too small. SCEE ship to around 100 different countries world wide, but Nintendo (for the purposes of the graph) count Europe as UK, France, Germany and Spain. For Microsoft this is no big loss as those four countries account for around 90-95% of their PAL sales, for Sony it is a bigger issue as the four only account for 70% of their PAL sales.

Again, the numbers themselves are accurate and I can attest to that, for UK, Germany, France and Spain this paints a very accurate picture of sales, however, they cannot be used to extrapolate PAL sales.

 

Multiply the above figures for the four nations by 10/7 (~1.43) and you'd change that 70% into the 100% whole PAL market.

 

Thats good and all, but the US game market has not stood still. Between 2000-2005 the US game market generated roughly 10 billion a year in sales according to NPD. Since 2006 the US market has grown to roughly $20 billion. We've seen roughly a 100% growth and Europe has probably seen just as big or bigger growth in the revenue department.

The PAL markets outside of Europe would need roughly a 100% growth just to keep up and maintain the 20% of SCEE revenue. And given thats these smaller low volume countries have higher distribution costs and see higher retail prices its highly doubtful that they outpace the Euro market enough to grow to 25 to 30% of SCEE.

 

Nintendo is just using tracking sites to produce those numbers. They really have no ideal of the accuracy of these figures outside maybe their own numbers and thats only if they handle the distribution of the third party software themselves. Something Nintendo did when selling carts and something I think Sony does now. Anyhow, They use these numbers because these organizations are trusted but its not like their formulas or methods have been put under scientific review to determine validity.

 

Well yes but it only validates my point that PS3 is selling slightly more software than 360.

 

Source? It would seem doubtful to me that MS depends on just those 4 countries for 90-95% of PAL sales, when 360 can put exclusives into the top 10 sales of other Euro countries.

Im trying to figure which publishers are selling more games for the PS3, because the 360 has generated more sales for EA, Activision, Take2 and Ubisoft in the last 6 months.

 

His job, which needs to be taken on faith or not.

 

360 can even put exclusives in the top 10 in Japan, so that doesn't mean anything.

Sony publishes a lot of games themselves.