Analysts Foresee Another Banner Year For Videogame Industry

Analysts observing the videogame industry forsee 2008 being another blockbuster year in sales. Sales during the month of February were considerably up, according to the NPD group. Early in the year is historically a very slow time in the game sales calendar, making the 34% jump for the month highly significant. Grand Theft Auto IV is likely to be an engine for sales throughout the year: "The game, which will be available on the Xbox 360 and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, is expected to boost sales of both consoles. Pre-orders have been better than expected, according to its publisher, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan, expects the game to sell about 9 million units during the company's fiscal year, which ends in October. Roughly 6 million of this, he added, will be to Xbox 360 owners."

Re:mgs4 and brawl must also be an engine

[junner518]

I believe Brawl will be one of the best games of the year. Nintendo has consistently had blowout sales on its super smash bros. franchise, and Brawl is definitely the best yet. It's way better than melee(no wavedashing, etc.) and brings a gameplay more similar to the first one. The characters are well balanced, but lend themselves to certain styles of playing. The graphics, although not what an Xbox 360 or PS3 fan would consider good, are still impressive. It is definitely evident that nintendo took some time to make this one perfect, even if it meant months of delays. And as far as I can tell, its pretty much everything I hoped for and more.

Blizzard will also be dropping big games

[Sithdemon]

With Wrath of the lich king and everyone praying Starcraft 2 comes out this year, that might over shadow alot of these big console games. Lich king especially will move big numbers, since it's just a expansion, so it's hard to screw up, and if it is, Blizzard can easily fix it, being a MMO and all. Also with "10 million players" it'll be hard not to capaitalize on even half those people. However Starcraft 2, "IF" it delivers the magic that the first one had, a few people might put down the controller and pick up that mouse and keyboard again. Sure it's a different era in the interactive media world, lots of top teir RTSs right now look much more advanced then Starcraft 2 (Compay of heroes, Supreme commander, world in conflict, Total war, and more) However as a multi player game, and blizzards balance and polish obsession the quality might outshine these other games. Lastly Blizzard tends to make the requirements EXTREMELY LOW, for the Minimum specifications, so there's a good chance most desktops and even laptops might be able to run it.

Re:Could be

[Anonymous Coward]

Please.

HDTV loses out on:
1. Cost.
2. Standard definition picture quality.
3. Cost of content.
4. Amount of content.
5. Cost of accessories.
6. The fact that I already own an SDTV.

Re:Buried lead: PS2 outselling PS3, still.

[Daniel Phillips]

From the article:

Going strong since its launch in 2000, Sony's PlayStation 2 continued to outpace its successor. The PS2 sold 351,800 units compared with 280,800 for the PS3.

Somehow, this indicates that the HDTV conversion isn't going according to plan.

Not necessarily a correct conclusion. Standard def tends to look great on an HD set, probably much better than standard def on a legacy standard def set.

This is really more about the quality of PS2 games. Lately I have been playing mostly PS2 games on my PS3 in fact. Some of them are simply amazing. For example, Shadow of the Colossus has to be seen to be believed. I only hope that games of that quality start appearing on next-gen consoles, tricked out with next-gen poly counts and physics. Kind of incredible the level of sophistication of the game engines that PS2 developers were able to put together. I rather expect history to repeat itself with the cell chip. I would be surprised if the cell has reached as much as 1/4 capacity in terms of graphics and physics resolution.

The Xbox 360 sold 254,600 units... compared with 280,800 for the PS3.

This is the important statistic from the article. Second month running. Quite unlikely for the XBox to every outsell the PS3 again, unfortunately for Microsoft's designs on the console market.

Re:I'll buy that...

[rsmith-mac]

I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but they don't jive with what VGChartz has [vgchartz.com]. The top series from the last generation:

- Grand Theft Auto: 41.16m units (SA: 15.36, VC: 14.20, GTA3:11.60)

- Gran Turismo: 23.75m units(GT3:14.87, GT4:8.88)

- Halo: 14.88m units (H1: 6.43, H2: 8.45)

- Super Smash Bros Melee: 7.08mil

And the list goes on and on and on. GTA was huge, followed by Gran Turismo, and then finally you get Halo. A lot of this has to do with the PS2 being the top selling console of the generation, but when a GTA game was the biggest selling game of a whole generation and the series by far the biggest of the generation, it's pretty rational to expect a ton of sales based on the name alone.

Re:Blood sports

[RichardX]

Oh please.
I'm a grade-A long-haired sandal-wearing granola-eating pacifist hippy, and even I don't think you have a leg to stand on here.
GTA is not presently, nor ever has been marketed at children. The video you linked to was made and uploaded by Joe Random and has nothing official whatsoever to do with GTA or Lego. I suspect that the uploader of that video is more likely to be sued than endorsed by the respective owners of the properties involved.

What happened to hand eye coordination? As far as I can see it's alive and well and making record profits on the Wii.

What happened to puzzle games? Not sure.. perhaps they've undergone something of a record resurgence of late, with web based 'casual games' for the PC, various offerings on Xbox Live, and the usual 'classic game' compilations for all major consoles, not to mention the DS and titles like Puzzle Quest..

As for dribbling and passing.. I'm not much of one for sports games myself, but unless basketball and football have changed very dramatically since last I checked then I'm pretty sure those are still available in whatever the latest seasonal update to the big sports franchises is (is the FIFA series even still going?). In fact, I hear there's also some kind of crazy high tech virtual reality system where you can go to a store, buy a REAL ball, and pass or dribble it outside with your friends - and it doesn't even need a network connection!

When did we turn our minds off to videogame butchery? You're a bit late getting on this bandwagon my friend. Apparently you totally missed Mortal Kombat, Bloodstorm, Robocop*, Hitman, Carmageddon, all of the previous GTA games, and a million other titles which temporarily escape my mind.

There's a simple solution to this - if you don't like the games, don't play them. And if you're letting underage kids play games like GTA then you're downright irresponsible.

I don't mean to sound all smug and glib about this, even though I know I probably do sound that way. Personally I have a similar issue with movies - I find the torture-porn genre which has become so popular of late (Saw, Hostel, Captivity, etc) to be utterly repulsive on just about every possible level. I can't understand for the life of me why anyone would want to watch movies like that, let alone make them.. but at the same time I wouldn't try and take away other people's right to watch that kind of thing if that's what they're into, so long as they're mentally capable of dealing with it in a mature way (i.e. they're an adult, for one thing)

*Yes, the Robocop game (from the 8/16 bit days) caused a minor storm, in the UK at least. "The movie is 18-rated! How dare you let children play this!", the daily mail readers screamed...