Wall Street Journal
Thanks to DQ reader Cliff Eyler for the tip that there’s an article in today’s Wall Street journal about sports-game licensing and the competition between EA and Take-Two.Believe it. Games are on page one of the Wall Street Journal, and not in column four, where they have articles about piano-playing parrots and the world’s largest ball of string.
Having said that, there’s nothing very revealing in the article—it covers ground that was planted months ago. However, there’s one tidbit that I hadn’t seen before. In 2003, Sega sold 361,000 copies of their pro football game. Last year, after dropping the price to $19.99 (and also making a brilliant game), they sold 2.8 million. That’s nearly 8X the sales in one year.
Madden still sold about 10% more copies than the previous year (5.6M vs. 5.1M, if I remember correctly), but remember that a huge number of those copies were sold at $29.99, because EA discounted Madden heavily and very early. They had to—ESPN was eating them up.
That’s what I mean when I say that the console market is incredibly price-sensitive, both with software and hardware.
I’d also be willing to bet that last year’s ESPN will still be better than this year’s Madden. Madden has some systemic problems that can’t be solved unless they build a new engine
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