| Naufraguito said: In the real world: Halo was underwhelming, the franchise seems like it's not what it was anymore, even if still sold well and move hardware. The reaction of the consumers about the PS4 pricecut is underwhelming as well. |
I think the only reasonable outlook on October 2015 NPD is that basically everybody lost.
It can't be underestimated just how far Halo 5 dropped compared to past entries, even if you include massive digital % (common industry understanding is that 20% is on the high end of things outside of PC gaming). I think it's also arguable that it moved hardware to any relevant degree. If we accept that 305k is with the Halo boost being what it was, what would it have been without Halo? 250k? 200k? I doubt it would have been under 175k for sure at the lowest. It's impossible to judge YoY because last October MS told everyone about the $329 bundle pricecuts, so they intentionally moved sales from October into Nov/Dec (which worked out quite well in the end imho).
Looking at Amazon combined with the narrow victory over the also disappointing PS4 sales in October, it's nearly certain that only the preorders from August and September got X1 to the 305k figure and the ~30k 'win'. For the biggest title in the entire Xbox universe, that is nearly catastrophic unless it has major legs in November/December. Again, looking at Amazon rankings along with Best Buy and Gamestop, that doesn't appear to the case. It seems that Halo 5 has had a massive dropoff both in bundle sales as well as individual SKUs for regular and LE games.
PS4 sold very poorly in October as well. It has never historically been a gigantic month, but for the first official pricecut to end up flat YoY is pretty weak. There is some caveat to that in the respect that preorders for the CoD and SW bundles were fairly huge on Amazon in October, so we may be seeing the effect that those sales were simply moved from October to November in substantial numbers. After all, the hyped games for the season are November games for the PS4, not remastered old stuff or legacy titles. CoD, Star Wars, and Fallout will be the top games of the holiday season, and nothing else will be remotely close to be honest.
And Nintendo, well. Not much to say, the WiiU has been in a tough spot for a long time, and the 3DS fell in hardware sales YoY, so there's nothing great happening there either.
Final conclusion : Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo had very poor showings for October on it's own merits. Everybody lost.
Now we have to see if this November and December see a bounceback, because Halo/PS4 pricecut month was an absolutel dud for the ages.
