When gamers hit Toys R Us and other tales of Black Friday
Sprinkled among the snaking lines of parents at a Toys R Us in New Jersey on Black Friday were diehard gamers. Many had no children to spoil. Nor were they particularly happy to be in the Toys R Us; but with gaming hardware fast selling out across the region, they followed the scent of the deal.
The Kinect moved especially fast, if early anecdotal evidence is any measure. Brisk sales of hardware like the PlayStation3, Xbox and Microsoft Kinect on the nation’s biggest annual shopping spree also bode well for software sales, says Mike Hickey, a Janco Partners analyst.
But which games were enticing fans to shell out on Black Friday?
“ We’re seeing strong sales of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft), Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft), Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard), Red Dead Redemption (Take-Two Interactive), Fallout: New Vegas (Bethesda), Gran Turismo 5 (Polyphony Digital) and Donkey Kong (Nintendo),” Hickey said.
Many of the hottest video items weren’t even on sale. The Microsoft Kinect, which was not discounted at any retailer on Black Friday (in fact, the price got jacked up on many secondary sellers’ websites), was out of stock both in stores and online at WalMart, Target and Best Buy.
GameStop also weighed in on Friday morning, telling Reuters about the traffic at its 800 US stores which opened at midnight, which were helped in part by the interest in the Kinect. “Preliminary reports from our stores record a lot of excitement,” said GameStop’s president Tony Bartel,” and there were many customers lined up at 5 am when the rest of the stores opened.
NPD analyst Stephen Baker said video games were “one of the better categories this holiday,” but low-priced televisions and aggressively priced laptops were the biggest sellers on Black Friday.
Cloud gaming service OnLive coming to the TV
OnLive, the closely-watched startup that is aiming to change the way people buy and play video games, officially launched last June. But the company says that was a mere warmup for the main event, which begins in a few weeks.
OnLive emerged from years of stealth development in 2009 with a somewhat audacious plan to offer so-called “cloud gaming”: instant, on-demand and lag-free access to video games stored remotely on servers in data centers.
The service started last June but was only accessible through a PC. But starting Thursday, OnLive began taking orders for its $99 “microconsole,” which connects easily to a TV and which will be delivered starting Dec. 2. Using the console, users can access a catalog of games that will grow to 50 by the end of the year, including big-name titles such as “Borderlands” and “NBA 2K11″
OnLive poses a threat to traditional home consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PS3, but only if it works as advertised and there are no stutters or hiccups in the game stream.
OnLive Chief Executive Steve Perlman said the carefully managed launch for PCs last June was to ensure that the company’s network could indeed handle the demand. But he said PC gaming only represents around 10 percent of the market, and that TVs are where the real action is. He won’t divulge OnLive’s user base, but said it has already hosted more than than 2 million game sessions.
“We’re up against quite a bit of skepticism, so we knew that if we made any misstep at all people would dismiss us out of hand,” Perlman said. “PC gaming was basically a test.”
The company is launching a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, just in time for the holidays. Perlman said his expectations for OnLive — whose investors include Warner Bros., Autodesk, Maverick Capital, AT&T, British Telecommunications and The Belgacom Group — are “much higher” than last summer.
Sony on the Apple challenge in games, e-books
Apple is, of course, absent from this week’s video game extravaganza, the E3 Expo in Los Angeles. The company just doesn’t do trade shows. But its presence looms over the event.
Apple has managed to create a whole new gaming market with the iPhone since its debut in 2007. There are tens of thousands of games available for download via Apple’s App Store, and it’s an open debate as to how much the iPhone’s success has hurt the traditional hardware makers, namely Nintendo and Sony, which both make portable gaming devices.
Nintendo is making a big push to differentiate its portable gaming platform with it’s new 3D-enabled DS, which offers a glasses-free experience.
And Sony, for its part, said it doesn’t really see Apple as a true competitor in the gaming space. In an interview Tuesday at E3, Kaz Hirai, head of Sony Computer Entertainment and the company’s networked products and services group, said Apple is creating a complimentary market:
“They’ve created a great market for a lot of casual games, but I think the important thing to remember… is that what we bring to the table is a completely different experience from the casual gaming that Apple brings…It’s a different kind of gaming, there are some buttons [on the iPhone] but they’re not physical buttons, and if you’re looking for precision game play you have to have physical buttons,” Hirai said.
“What we stand for as an industry, the traditional video gamer if you will, it’s more ‘let’s sit down and play an immersive gaming experience’ as opposed to “I’ll pick it up I’ll play for 5 minutes and then life goes on.’”
And what about the iPad, which besides its obvi0us promise as a gaming platform, is also taking on Sony and Amazon.com in the e-reader market?
Black Friday sprint begins for video game industry
Black Friday marks the beginning of the most critical time of the year for video game makers, as customers jam stores on the day after Thanksgiving to pick up games and consoles as gifts.
As a brutal 2009 winds to a close, the gaming industry is hoping that a strong six weeks of sales in the United States, the largest market, could help them salvage something from the year.
Nintendo said Monday its Wii home console — the long-time U.S. champ that has been struggling lately — sold more than 550,000 units in the U.S. during Thanksgiving week. To put that in perspective, the company sold around 500,000 Wiis in all of October, according to industry tracker NPD.
Not to be outdone, Sony announced Tuesday that demand for its PlayStation 3 console over the Thanksgiving week “was at an all time high.” The company said it sold 440,000 units for the week in the U.S.
Both Nintendo and Sony have recently slashed prices on their consoles, as has Microsoft with its Xbox 360. The PS3, which is more popular with hard-core gamers, has seen plenty of momentum since the price cut. At the same time, Nintendo has set up holiday kiosks in malls across the country to give consumers the opportunity to play its casual and family-friendly games.
A more complete picture on who turned in the best Black Friday performance will come later this month, when NPD releases its November sales data.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Xbox, Youtube, iPhone
We caught up with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings at the movie rental company’s event where it awarded a $1 million prize after a contest aimed at improving the accuracy of movie recommendations. He spoke about his hopes of working with Apple on the iPhone, the possibility that YouTube will beef up its movie service, and the future of the DVD.
Reuters: What will Netflix subscribers gain from the improvements in the recommendation system?
Hastings: It’s doubling the quality of our movie recommendation and that helps our subscribers get more enjoyment from movies. Because more often they love the movie they watch. More often the movies recommended will will turn out to be movies that you love. If you watch a couple of movies and don’t like many, you start to watch (sports and other programming). If every movie is incredible, you start to watch more.
Reuters: Netflix video streams on Microsoft’s Xbox Live system. What about the PS3 and Wii? Hastings: Eventually we want to be on all the game consoles, all the Blu-ray players, all the Internet TVs. So we are working in parallel with all of those efforts. Currently our Xbox deal is exclusive and we haven’t characterized it more than that.
Reuters: Any plans to work in partnership with Apple and the iPhone? Hastings: it’s something that’s likely to come over time. But nothing in the short term. (With) movie watching, we are not focused on mobile yet, but (instead) on the TV, on Blu-ray and on the video game consoles. We will get to mobile eventually, including the iPhone.
Reuters: What of Youtube’s potential movie service? Hastings: I think there will be a lot of competition in this market: Hulu, Apple, Amazon, Youtube, Blockbuster. Internet video is a huge opportunity. And there will be a lot of people engaged, and that is going to be great for the consumer. All of us are going to innovate and compete with each other and provide more and more value to the consumer.
Putting Netflix on a Wii is a great idea, it’s the best selling console in the nation and it’s very family centered and oriented. Obviously going from playing Wii Fit to watching a movie on the same family console is a great marketing strategy. Nintendo even does promotional stuff, like this online one I’ve found for a FREE Wii. Check out the link for more info on how to get it.
http://www.gamesncs.com/rd_p?p=192108&t= 9528&a=13190-wii&gift=3679
