GamesIndustry International

Weak franchise performance fails to boost US market, says Cowen and Company.

Sales of two blockbuster titles during March - Microsoft's Gears of War: Judgement and Sony's God of War: Ascension - are likely to disappoint the market, failing to match previous success in their respective franchises.

Cowen & Company today released an investor note estimating sales of Gears of War: Judgement to be around 425,000 units in the US during the month compared to first month sales of over 2 million units for Gears of War 3, released in September 2011.

And sales of God of War: Ascension are estimated at just 360,000 units compared to 1.1 million for God of War 3, released in March 2010.

"We had expected sales trends to improve in March due to a strong core line-up," wrote the company. "Two historically strong franchises appear to have significantly underperformed."

Titles that will have performed much better during the month according to Cowen & Company estimates are Square Enix' Tomb Raider with 696,000 units in 33 days and Take-Two's Bioshock Infinite with 665,000 copies sold in 10 days.

As a result of these sales, the analyst expects NPD to report console and handheld software sales to be down 21 per cent year-on-year and total packaged video game sales to drop by 17 per cent, including a 66 per cent rise in PC game sales due to the release of SimCity and Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-04-16-poor-gears-of-war-god-of-war-sales-in-march

I don't think this is that surprising,

Both are good games but both were technically not needed after the trilogy

Nobody was expecting these to be successors to the original trilogies, especially Gears, its a spin off prequel mostly by a different developer and made for different audiences.

well everyone is looking to the next gen systems too, i am reluctant to buy anything for the two systems, with the next gen just down the road from now.

Honestly didn't know these games were even out. Have not seen any marketing at all for either of the games, and i remember being bombarded with information with previous entries in the series

This too, I havn't seen one gears advert in the UK, and know a lot of people who also didn't know about it

So how did we do on Tomb Raider & Bioshock Infinite? *yes I'm too lazy to look*

Its obvious this gen is dieing, people just don't get excited as much, they are just too similar to past games on the same systems.

I think GTA5 , TLOU, Beyond and MGS(5) are the last new releases I will buy this gen, if there will be no next gen versions.

And I really hope all these games get next gen editions so I don't have to buy them for PS3, this gen was extremly long 7 years for Sony and 8 for MS. At some point people grow tired of everything.

Shocking news! Prequels with clearly less effort and marketing are selling less! These franchises are doomed!

That'll be some overtracking we've got if those estimates are right. They sound like far too much of a drop to me.