Thursday, October 29, 2009

Console Post Catch-All

As part of the "catch-all," I saw today that Activision is pricing DJ Hero DLC at $3 per track.

Good luck with that.

After the console post last week, Chris Kohler e-mailed and said that Gamasutra had included the average selling price of the Wii in its September NPD anaysis (Matt Matthews, excellent work as always). That meant, in theory, that we could mathematically determine how many units sold at $249 and how many sold at $199.

The average selling price was $218. That works out to 166,700 at $249.99 and 296,100 at $199.99.

Chris also mentioned that the length of the time the Wii was selling at $199 (based on NPD reporting periods) was actually a week, not four days. So the Wii was at the new price for 20% of the reporting period.

Math all that out, so to speak, and it means that the Wii sold about 41,500 units a week at $249. And 296,000 a week at $199. In September.

Holy crap. That's more than three times the weekly sales rate of the PS3 in one of its best months ever.

So when I said Nintendo might have a huge October, I should amend that to "Huge+". The record for October (beginning November 2001, when NPD began making the sales numbers public) is 803,000 units (the Wii last year), so keep that in mind when you hear the October numbers in a few weeks.

That's the good news for Nintendo.

The bad news is that they announced on Wednesday that Wii sales were only 5.75 million for the last six months versus 10 million for the same period last year. However, if the September NPD numbers are any indication (based on the last week of the reporting period), they'll be making some of that ground up, and quickly.

In terms of software, I don't think there's anything more to say at this point. Beginning with last fall's tremendously ill-fated decision to make Wii Music their centerpiece of the holiday season, Nintendo has been in a rut. Wii Sports Resort is quite fun, but there's just absolutely no depth in Nintendo's software lineup right now.

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