Video Games Sales, A Key Marker For Consumer Sentiment, Fall Apart
Video games are perfect entertainment during a recession. Game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft (MSFT) Xbox, and Sony (SNE) Playstation, only cost a few hundred dollars. The games that work on them have prices as low as under…
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Games sales continued to fall apart in June. Research firm NPD reports that sales were down 29% compared to the same month last year. Sales of game hardware dropped 38%. That means that the consumer is in enough trouble that even a modest investment in low-end electronics is, in many cases, beyond his reach.
Sony (SNE) is still getting the worst of the video games sales retreat. It sold only 164,700 PS3s in the US last month. The is awfully small compared with the 361,700 units of Nintendo’s Wii sold.
Nintendo will continue to do well as a company. Its lead in the industry looks insurmountable. Microsoft may still be posting modest sales, but video games are a minuscule part of its overall business. Sony cannot afford the ongoing failure of the PS3. It has too much riding on the product, and it has no way to mount a comeback against its two competitors.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.