EMEAA Up! 1st October

[Alby_da_Wolf]

binary solo said:

Seece said:

The bump this week was due to the holidays very slowly starting to ramp up. I don't have any figures on EMEAA this week but a guess would say if it's down it won't be much, what with holidays approaching and riding the coatails of Forza, Fifa and Gears.

Edit - oh forgot, forza isn't even out this week! I doubt Rage/Dark Souls will do much for 360

Seems a mite early for holiday kick to start, isn't it more like mid-late Oct? None of our retailers have started hanging up the Christmas stuff yet.

What sort of HW lift do you expect for Forza 4? It's a good selling franchise, but being the 3rd of the gen does it have much HW spiking potential? There are surely still quite a few white 360's out in the wild and perhaps some people wait for a particular game to launch to swap to a 360s, so many 360 exclusives could see HW spikes for this reason, F4 among them. I don't really see sim racers (of any kind) being the sort of game that excites new console buyers, not at this point in the lifecycle at least.

Been seeing some pretty awesome PS3 deals lately:  320GB sku + Move starter pack + Sports Champs for NZD$499 (*0.77 for USD). That's almost $100 cheaper than the vanilla 160GB before the price cut. Nice for the historically high NZ dollar to finally be reflected in the retail price for PS3. Not sure if 360 price here is also trending down because of the current exchange rate.

If you want to see good, but quite strange deals, come in Italy this week: GameStop already added an unofficial cut bringing PS3 160 GB from 249€ to 229€ with a game added too, but the best deal was at MediaWorld from 6th october for one week for their 20th anniversary in Italy (they are doing offer all the year, each week something different), PS3 320GB FIFA bundle at 249€. They also offered the old black Wii bundle with WS and WSR at 99€ and XB360 250GB at 179€. The strange part of the deal was that unlike GameStop, they left the 160GB at 249€, the result was FIFA bundle almost sold out after 2 days of offer (the panel outside of the store probably updated in the morning, said 32 units left, when I went there in the evening there were 3 units left) and a pile of unsold 160GBs. Other PS3 320GB + game bundles had quite normal slightly discounted prices, 289-299€. Kinect + XB360 250GB bundle is the most expensive at GameStop here, being priced 329€. Unsurprisingly, with such strange pricings, the best seller of the week, the only PS3 SKU almost sold out, was PS3 FIFA bundle at MediaWorld (they stated 3000 units were available nationwide for the offer). Surprisingly, instead, the good Wii offer wasn't sold out (but they had 10000 units nationwide), neither was the XB360 one (4000 units, but it must be said it was a good offer, but the only one with no games bundled).

Note: 1 Euro is ~US$ 1.33 these days, but our prices include 21% VAT, so our list prices are currently 10% overpriced compared to USA, they used to be 20% overpriced when the Euro was more than $ 1.4 and VAT was still 20%.