Activision has announced that Guitar Hero 3 has become the first ever billion-selling video game.
That is, it is the first game to ever make over one billion dollars at retail. Which is naturally due to the game’s higher price point than the typical video game. Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock is available for Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PC and Mac.
Regardless, this an incredible milestone for any video game and for the gaming industry at large. Last year Activision announced that the Guitar Hero franchise as a whole had made over $1 billion in revenue for publisher Activision, but to have that amount be broken by a SINGLE game is mind-blowing. You may recall that sales of Guitar Hero 3 actually surpassed that of its sequel, Guitar Hero World Tour, over the holidays due to the fact that Guitar Hero 3 had been discounted by many retailers and was thus cheaper than World Tour (which is funny, I was given Guitar Hero 3 as a gift from a friend, so I contributed to that). World Tour is available on Wii, PS2, PS3 and Xbox 360.
What’s more, everything that has been associated with Guitar Hero has seen a boost. For example, when Guitar Hero Aerosmith released, first-week sales of Aerosmith’s last album tripled. There is a lot of this kind of very interesting information that was revealed by Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith at the Consumer Electronic’s Show 2009 keynote.
Here is the play-by-play on other interesting sales facts for the Guitar Hero franchise:
– Downloads (iTunes, Zune, etc.) for artists attached to Guitar Hero have risen 15%.
– First-week sales of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith tripled Aerosmith’s last album sales.
– Total downloads for Guitar Hero series: 21 million units.
– 141,000 user-generated songs for Guitar Hero World Tour exist
– Two-third of non musicians exposed to music games plan to start playing a real instrument.
– Three-fourths of musicians say they’ve spent more time with their real instruments since playing music games.
– From January to September 2008, sales of electric guitars and amps went up 27% for Guitar Center. They attribute this sales rise to Guitar Hero.
– “Games are poised to eclipse all other forms of entertainment in the decade ahead including box office, home video, recorded music, books, magazines and newspapers which are all stagnant or contracting (i.e. shrinking) entertainment markets. Gaming is growing and capturing a larger share of all media. Gaming is changing the world of storytelling, the world of music and the world of entertainment in ways we never could have imagined a few years ago, and certainly not in 1972.”
– software sales have risen 40% in the same time period