Re: Madden Sales Down 18% Y-o-Y from last year
This 18% drop was a 12% surge in total sales just 3 short months ago using the same data. That's a huge turnaround in such a short time in terms of sales trends. The game was red hot and is now ice cold, that's not a recipe for success during the all-important Holiday season. As far as your last point, I have no idea what you are trying to say
Yes, the PS2 had a large volume of sales, but don't discount hardware replacement and late arrivals to the scene either. In terms of North American actual installed userbases, the number was a good bit smaller than 50 million during the boom years of Madden (and if you try to bring in Japanese and European hardware totals I'll ask you to go find more than 10,000 people total playing Madden in those countries).
FIFA is just one example of great sales growth due to quality. You can also look at NHL for an example. NBA 2K also saw good growth overall, but not as dramatic as NHL or FIFA.
Again, Madden started off very quickly and was actually above last years pace even including the PS2 and as the game has spent time on the shelf and it is now alarmingly behind last year's pace. Of course, this is a trend that has to hold for it to become a problem since November and December are much bigger months for Madden than October is historically. However, you can't have your cake and eat it too (in reference to your newest post). If you want to use Madden's strong sales out of the gate this year to support your thesis, then you have to dump the PS2 argument from the equation, although it has to be dumped anyways due to simple mathematics.
Considering they made up around 10% of last year's total sales on all platforms and so far about 6% of this year's sales, I'd have to say they can't mathematically be responsible for all of an 18% drop...but definitely a piece
As total volume of sales, over 90% of Madden's sales occur from August to December, so anything from late December onwards is perfectly reasonable if you want to reference it, just as an FYI to anyone digging for sales data -- you can just use NPD though since that's what they all reference
This 18% drop was a 12% surge in total sales just 3 short months ago using the same data. That's a huge turnaround in such a short time in terms of sales trends. The game was red hot and is now ice cold, that's not a recipe for success during the all-important Holiday season. As far as your last point, I have no idea what you are trying to say
It's clear that there isn't a more dominant platform than the PS2 in the last decade, as a result comparing PS2 -> PS3 and expecting things to just work out and using that as your premise that things are less than satisfactory is flawed. Could things be better? Always. For your FIFA example... i'd point in part to improvement to a good game, but also the fact that we're not that far removed from a World Cup either.
FIFA is just one example of great sales growth due to quality. You can also look at NHL for an example. NBA 2K also saw good growth overall, but not as dramatic as NHL or FIFA.
Because there is no accurate comparison, but there were almost a million PS2 sales in 2009. Those sales aren't being replaced as quickly as that platform died, this is one reason there are 'losses' for Madden as a title.
Without knowing how much the PS2 sales make up for the lag in sales the figure is 100% meaningless.
Percentages dont work like that, and please point out where the numbers are wrong by the way... at a glance it looks like those are year end figures, or do you think that nothing was sold from the end of the year and the 9 months following it prior to the next Madden's release?
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