After the Months of Marketing Comes the Day of Reckoning
For video-game players, the holidays are clearly the busiest, most wonderful time of the year. The shopping season is when most of the biggest games are released and when hardware makers like Nintendo and Sony usually unveil their snazziest products.
For people who actually make games, however, the holidays can actually be kind of slow. That’s because by December their new babies have been shipped out the door, the boxes are in stores and warehouses and all that is left to do is sit and wait for the sales data to come back from NPD, the market research firm most everyone in the industry depends on.
For 2006 the big day was Thursday, when the firm released its annual retail report of hardware sales and the Top 10 selling console games of the year. (The data released on Thursday do not include PC games.) The list includes a mixture of sequels and newcomers; some well regarded games didn’t make it at all.