Game Sales Up As Madden Leads Charge

Thanks to Reuters for their report that last month's video game sales rose 4 percent from August 2002, due in significant part to EA's Madden NFL 2004, which "...sold 1.45 million units on the PS2 and 310,000 units on the Xbox in the month, generating sales of more than $86 million. Sales of Madden for GameCube were negligible." There were new figures on hardware sales, too, as "PS2 sold 291,000 units in August to bring its installed base in the United States to 18.8 million, while... Xbox sold 144,000 units to rise to 5.8 million and... GameCube sold 100,000 units to 4.5 million." Analysts suggested that PS2 sales "continue to lag behind expectations" (1 million short of the 9.5 million hoped), and predicted that Nintendo will "...introduce their own bundle or price cut by the end of September" (scanned early-October print ads for a major US retailer have the GameCube at $99.)

GameCube Owners & Sports

[Mr Syd]

This seems to suggest that GC owners are not sports fans (or not football fans, anyways) - 7% of PS2 owners bought Madden , 5% of XBox owners, but 0% (???) of GC owners... Come to think of it, I own a GC (and N64) and I have never bought a sports title...

wow...

[ff_cid]

No wonder Sega didn't put ESPN on the Gamcube. I'd expect to see quite a few EA sports games dropped from Gamcube next year too.

Re:Negligible!

[bildstorm]

Ahh... Yeah. Because race has everything to do with aggressive music.

Reality is that the GameCube tends to be bought by people with children. Most people don't want their children to listen to aggressive music or to play violent games. Having worked in videogame sales, I know the difference between the platforms. Proportionally there are far fewer violent games for the GameCube than for PS2 and Xbox.

I love it when cowards call me racist, particularly when they don't know my skin colour, ethnicity, where I've lived, and what I do now. LOL!

XBOX Live

[PaleGreen]

I'd like to see how many XBOX owners passed on Madden due to its lack of Live support. I'm sure the folks at Sega (ESPN Football) aren't complaining!

The only choices in 2004 on GameCube

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

Are NHL 2003 from EA, and NHL Hitz Pro. Sega 2K4 (aka ESPN Hockey) is not releasing on the GameCube. The September issue of Game Insider had a column by column comparison of the 4 hockey games for 2004 (it includes the XBox only game from Microsoft, NHL Rivals).

If Sega 2K4 (aka ESPN Hockey) was coming to the Cube there would be debate -- but it is NOT. It is a decision between EA and Midway, and it's a pretty damned easy decision there. EA looks to have put in a whole lot of work to make 2004 a really good game, and the previews have been pretty good so far.

And if you are scoring 17 goals vs. the Wings in NHL 2003, maybe you should turn up the difficulty a notch? There are 4 difficulty levels, and within each you can give goalie advantages and skater advantages to either team.