Video Game Sales Plunge

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Research firm NPD reported that video game sales fell 29% in June to $699.8 million. Hardware sales dropped 45% year-over-year. This was despite the release of the new Nintendo 3DS. “The 3DS is still up nearly 25 percent over where the Nintendo DS was in a similar point in time after release to market, and has topped portable hardware sales for the last 11 months,” Anita Frazier, an NPD analyst, wrote in the report about June.

The problem is that June 2011 was a period in which a lot of new games first came to market. Furthermore, the single greatest challenge to console and game sales is the migration of gaming to smartphones, which have become de facto handheld game devices. Many of the games for these are free or very inexpensive. The challenge is one that the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Xbox, Sony (NYSE: SNE) PS3 and Nintendo cannot easily fight off. Smartphone games are easy to download, and the overall use of smartphones for most daily tasks has soared.

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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