Xbox 360
The Hits of the Holidays
By now we’ve all seen the sales charts. Games make great holiday gifts – easy to wrap, and the recipient vanishes from underfoot for days afterwards. No one even pretends that video games are a niche market and strictly for pasty-fleshed young males, especially now that WOW is a firmly established mass market success – over the holidays that title was being advertised on For Better Or For Worse’s website, for crying out loud. (FBOFW is a “domestic” comic strip detailing the adventures of a young stay at home wife with two small children. X-Men, it is not.) EVE’s flashy ad peeked out at me this morning from the Washington Post’s opinion section. Facebook wanted me to try all kinds of games in the waning hours of 2008.
Anyway, under the tree or the shrub or the menorah or whatever were all kinds of games – many of which were bought by people who do not actually play games. Holiday sales are therefore often the triumph of advertising and end cap display tactics. If BigPublishingCompany can convince Aunt Myrtle that everyone is dying for a copy of “Big Guns Go Blooey: Electric Bugaloo,” never mind that it’s a hunk of derivative and badly scored crap, they will win the sales chart game. And their investors will love them. And the whole scam resets and plays through again.
But if you’re reading this, you know better. Real success is what people actually play past that first post-holiday morning. Those titles pick up word of mouth and come to own the coming year. Look at Call of Duty 4 (specifically, look at the chart from the last column). That puppy launched in November of 2007, and picked up serious steam as the year wore on. I don’t know if we can call the next COD4 based on one week of data, but what the hell, ya’ll, it’ll be fun to try. Let’s see what we’ve got!
Get In Gears… Gears of War 2, That Is
You totally expected to see something about Wrath of the Lich King, didn’t you? Well, listen, GamerDNA is for all gamers, not just MMOG nerds like… um… me. And second, if they had launched on a Tuesday like EQ2 and LOTRO are going to, giving us enough time to pull data, maybe we would have. 
Okay, seriously. Gears of War was THE shooter hit of 2006 in many ways. Three million copies in ten weeks is pretty awesome. To date, the title has sold over five million copies. Microsoft is currently predicting that total sales of the Xbox 360 will hit 25 million at some point this holiday season, with 22 million having been sold at the end of September. If no one buys a single copy of Gears of War from this moment on, and if Microsoft hits their goal, more than one of every five Xbox households will have a copy of this game.
Expectations for last week’s launch of Gears of War 2 were pretty high, you might say. Two million copies have already been sold. One week! Two million! Man, it must feel good to be Epic right now.
Can the data tell us anything we didn’t already know? To the numbers!
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