“We expected far higher sales for the month, as we succumbed to much of the hype surrounding the relatively high-profile launches of The Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5… We had expected the former to sell 1.3 million units, and thought that sales of the disc would drive sales of older Rock Band bundles; instead, the game sold fewer than half our estimate, and overall sales came in at $73 million, well below our $140 million estimate.”
“Similarly, we thought that the giveaway of a voucher for Guitar Hero Van Halen would have great appeal, and would drive Guitar Hero 5 sales. The game sold fewer than our 700,000 unit estimate, and overall Guitar Hero sales were only $43 million, well below our $75 million unit estimate, [Activision's music games sales could be down as much as 25% over last year]… These results lead us to conclude that music genre sales will be down more significantly this year than we had previously expected,”
“We remain convinced that software sales will rebound to solidly double-digit growth beginning in November, and will remain there each month through August 2010. However, it is likely that investor confidence will continue to be weak until a solid growth pattern emerges,” - Michael Pachter, Wedbush Morgan
I’m not sure why so many analysts were putting so much stock into these two games. It seemed pretty clear that gamers had moved away from buying large quantities of plastic instruments and were focusing on buying DLC for the existing music games that they had.
I predict that after the first of the year we will be having a similar discussion about the poor sales of DJ Hero.
-Justin
