"Slight Increase"
Are you kidding me? This is from the NPD group (thanks Blog for the Sports Gamer):The top seller for the month of August was far and away EA's Madden NFL 06, which sold through about 2.2 million units. This is a slight increase over Madden 05's performance last August (2.1 million units)…
Let me get this straight: you bitches bought an exclusive NFL license for $300 million ($60 million/year), you have no competition, and your sales are up less than four freaking percent? You sold an extra five million dollars worth of Robo-ball, with actual profit far less than that, and you’re sucking that exclusive license down at sixty million dollars a year?
That’s not even the best part. Here’s the best part: I guarantee the installed console base is up more than four percent from last year. As a percentage of the total installed base, the percentage of people who bought Madden actually went down.
Man, I bet that doesn’t taste like chicken. Congratulations, geniuses. You spent sixty million dollars this year and bought ass. Even funnier, when Blitz: The League comes out and sells over 500,000 units, I bet your face gets all red and those little veins on your neck start sticking out.
Now, EA is going to spin this hard. At the end of the year, they’ll crow about how great the game is (bullshit) and what a great deal the exclusive license was for them (also bullshit). The truth will be that with two additional platforms for the game (PSP and Xbox 360), the total number of copies sold will go up, but they would have gone up anyway—without an exclusive license.
EA couldn’t compete on level ground, and they were desperate, so they scratched a gigantic check and thought it would solve their problems. Here’s the problem, though—when you’re desperate to leave town, and you see a train, don’t just jump on it, because it might be going straight to Stupidville.
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