Video Game Business Hurt In February, Nintendo Crushed

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The video game industry had another rough outing in February as revenue fell 15% from last year. Total sales of games and consoles totaled $1.26 billion in the US.

Microsoft (MSFT) and Sony (SNE) at least gained ground from the first month of this year. Their console sales were up over January. Xbox 360 were 422,000 units, up from 322,800. PS3 sales were 360,100 units, up from 276,900 in January. Nintendo’s Wii sold 397,900 units, down from 465,800 .

Nintendo has a huge lead in console sales for over two years. Industry experts believe that the Wii platform is losing steam because its sales levels have reached a point of market saturation and it has fewer features that the PS3 and XBox 360. Microsoft and Sony have been aggressively adding new options to their consoles and have sharply dropped retail prices to bring their costs to the consumer closer to the Wii’s.

For the time being, it looks like Nintendo is in trouble, at least until it does a complete overhaul of the Wii.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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.

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