January Video Game Sales Plunge

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

An monthly rite among tech reporters is to cover the NPD Group video game data. The information shows which of the three large console companies–Micorosft, with its Xbox, Nintendo, and Sony which makes the PS3–is doing well. NPD also reports what video games are selling well.

The wrinkle in the data is that the rise of smartphones has begun to take market share from traditional video game consoles, just as it has taken market share from almost every other related industry from PCs to televisions.

The report for January showed, according to Gamasutra

As expected, the strongest performing software in January was left over from the holiday period. In fact, no January debuts managed to crack the software top ten chart.   Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was the best selling game, followed by Ubisoft’s Just Dance 3 and Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.   Software sales across all consoles and portables brought in $355.9 million, a 38 percent decline over January 2011. Retail PC games add another $23.7 million to that total.

And.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was the top selling console for the sixth straight month. The 270,000 units it sold contributed to a total of $199.5 million in hardware-based revenues, a decline of 38 percent from the prior year.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

Featured Reads

Our top personal finance-related articles today. Your wallet will thank you later.

Continue Reading

Top Gaining Stocks

CBOE Vol: 1,568,143
PSKY Vol: 12,285,993
STX Vol: 7,378,346
ORCL Vol: 26,317,675
DDOG Vol: 6,247,779

Top Losing Stocks

LKQ
LKQ Vol: 4,367,433
CLX Vol: 13,260,523
SYK Vol: 4,519,455
MHK Vol: 1,859,865
AMGN Vol: 3,818,618