The American video games industry sales have gone down 8% between 2010 and 2011, down 2% if you add up retail & digital sales year over year in the U.S. for the full year. All in all, Call of Duty is clearly the favorite series of the past year!
The American game tracking service NPD lines up the bestselling video games of 2011 from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft consoles, as well as PC.
Annual 2011 Top 10 Games (New Physical Retail only; across all platforms incl. PC):
1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC)** – Activision-Blizzard
2. Just Dance 3 (Wii, Xbox 360, PS3) – Ubisoft
3. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)** – Bethesda Softworks
4. Battlefield 3 (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)** – Electronic Arts
5. Madden NFL 12 (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PSP, PS2)** – Electronic Arts
6. Call of Duty: Black Ops (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, NDS, PC)** – Activision-Blizzard
7. Batman: Arkham City (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)** – Warner Bros. Interactive
8. Gears of War 3 (Xbox 360)** – Microsoft
9. Just Dance 2 (Wii) – Ubisoft
10. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (Xbox 360, PS3, PC) – Ubisoft
** Includes CE, GOTY editions, bundles, etc. but not those bundled with hardware.
Modern Warfare 3 had big Hollywood commercials to drive attention to itself…
The details reported by the NPD:
The preliminary estimate for total consumer spend on gaming content via all monetization methods, including new physical video and PC games, used games, game rentals, subscriptions, digital full-game downloads, social network games, downloadable content, and mobile games, is between $16.3 to $16.6 billion. This total consumer spend on games content in 2011, which includes both physical and digital formats, represents sales that are down approximately 2 percent when compared to 2010.
Based on this estimate, spending on new physical content at retail continues to account for the majority of the total consumer spend on games content. U.S. retail sales of new physical video game content, which includes portable, console and PC game software, generated revenues of $9.3 billion, an 8 percent decline over the $10.1 billion generated in 2010.
Bright spots came from HD console software sales, which were up 9 percent in 2011, as well as increases in the consumer spend on used games sales, full-game digital downloads and downloadable content, and mobile gaming apps, which partially offset declines in the other areas of consumer spend on content.
“Overall industry results are not entirely surprising given that we are on the back end of the current console lifecycle, combined with the continued digital evolution of gaming. Core gamers continue to be engaged and spend on established franchises across both the digital and physical format using multiple devices for different gaming occasions,” said Anita Frazier, industry analyst, The NPD Group.
“Our overall estimate of the market continues to point toward the increased imperative for deeper visibility into digital distribution than is available today, not only in the U.S. but globally. This is the goal of our partnership with EEDAR, and central to our discussions with publishers and others in the gaming community,” said David McQuillan, president, Games at The NPD Group. – Via NeoGaf