Business of Esports - 230. Office Hours: Game Sales On The Decline

Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of

office hours with the professor. As always, I'm your host,

William the professor Kahless. And I want to get right into our

story this week, and that is, game sales are down. This comes

from a sports business journal article, which is commenting on

NPD data. And apparently for the month of April, game sales are

down 8% compared to the same month last year to 4.3 billion.

And in fact, year to date, sales for games are also down 8% to

18. Point 3 billion. I first want to start this article with

just an early comment, which is a little bit facetious, but I

sort of mean it, it's a little bit who cares. Because the

reality is, lots of industries are down. There's a lot going on

in our world today, and 4.3 billion for single month of

sales is still a huge number. The other piece about this is in

the NPD data, not necessarily all digital game sales are

included. So particularly as more and more game sales shift

to digital. I'm more and more skeptical of sort of the

magnitude of this trend, our game sales probably down year on

year. Yes. Is it something we should be worried about as an

industry? No. So you might say, well, William, why did you want

to do this story at all? Then if your comment is who cares? game

sales are down? And the answer is because I want to talk about

the sales of two specific games. I want to talk about the sales

of Horizon forbidden West, and Elven. Right. Because I would

argue that these games are pretty similar. They're both

very deep involved RPGs. And they're both actually

surprisingly large. I would also argue that they're both

absolutely incredible games, I played both, I found each of

them to just be real wheel masterworks that clearly, their

developers put just so much passion and love into however, I

think if you look at the sales data for these games, you see

sort of an interesting story. So Elden ring has sold incredibly

well. In April, it was the second best selling game of the

month. And I believe the prior month, it was number one. And

this is after launching. So towards the end of February. So

this is basically launch month sales data. In contrast horizon

forbidden West was the fifth most popular games, then march

and down to the seventh best or most popular games selling in

April. And, you know, you could argue that these numbers are

good for forbidden West, because it is a console exclusive. And

that's certainly true to some extent. But you do see console

exclusives like say Caribbean and forbidden lands, cracking

the top three, I would argue that horizons are bitten West

should be selling better than it is. And I would argue that

reason is Elden. Right? Because they're really going after the

same consumers. And I think Elden ring has kind of sucked up

the game or Zeitgeist about that phenomenal, you know, largely

single player driven RPG experience. So why did I want to

talk about this, I want to talk about this because this

highlights something to me that I think is coming increasing

problem in our industry, the difficulty of finding launch

windows for games, like let's just be honest, the games

calendar is getting more and more crowded. It used to be I

remember a time when there was a real post-holiday slump, when

nothing really important would launch in February. And now, you

know, you can just look at the launch calendar, you had some

stunning games like horizon and Elven rain coming out in that

time period. And I would also argue, if you were a marketer

working on horizon for bitten West, that February launch

window probably felt pretty safe to you know, I'd rather go up

against something like elven ring and say Call of Duty.

Right. You know, I think you know, there's always going to be

competitors out there. I think elven ring probably felt

relatively safe. And I even see, you know, some intelligent

decisions made around the exact launch timing with horizon

choosing to go out a week before, Eldon rain better to

launch first, if you can. So I think it's a relatively

intelligent and well chosen launch time. And it just shows

the difficulty of even getting a triple A constant title, like

horizon into a calendar, where it can find breathing room to

get the full credit for the excellent game it is, and

candidly get the appreciation it deserves. This is another factor

limiting our industry. It's not just big budgets. It's not just

long, Dev times. It's not just the complexity of launching

triple A games. It's literally how do you find a window to get

your triple A game to breathe in. And I think the conflict

between horizon and Elven ring perfectly illustrates just how

crowded we are as a market and candidly how tough it is for new

or innovative IPs to even find a launch window to break in.

Basically, if you aren't an established triple A game with a

preset launch timing. It's just really hard to find a moment for

you to breathe in the sun. So it's just a fun little story. I

wanted to talk about highlighting, I think a little

bit of a less traveled angle on sales data in our in our games

industry. So I hope you enjoyed this week's office hours and I

look forward to seeing you next week.