Sunday, January 13, 2013

Pwned! Video games take hit in 2012 | Clocking In | a mySA.com blog

Top selling video games of 2012

The video game industry experienced some serious lag in 2012 as the NPD Group reports retail sales dropped 22 percent to $13.26 billion, down from 2011?s $17 billion.

It?s a pretty steep fall, but game makers won?t be rage quitting anytime soon.

It seems like every year observers claim the video game industry as we know it (i.e. consoles) is on hospice and ready to kick.

However, 2012?s top grossing video game earned more than the top grossing movie of the year.

In 2012, ?Marvel?s The Avengers? made $623,279,547; but within the first 15 days of its November 2012 release, ?Call of Duty: Black Ops 2? grossed more than $1 billion. Full 2012 sales for the game are not yet reported.

So don?t toss your controllers anytime soon.

The market research company NPD also reported that gaming hardware led the decline in 2012 with a 27 percent drop from 2011?s hardware sales.

Think about it though, there was not much hardware worth getting a hold of last year anyway, and Nintendo?s Wii U hit late in 2012. Even so, had the Wii U released in the first quarter, the Xbox 360 would have still owned it in sales.

We?re not in the ?90s anymore; serious console gamers outside of Japan do not drop big bucks on Nintendo consoles anymore.

Still, the Wii U might boost 2013 sales a bit, but the big jump will come when Xbox and PlayStation release their Krakens over the next two years.

So look for hardware sales to rebound, and with new consoles comes a rush of new games. Hopefully good games, but people will buy them anyway because of the guilty pleasure of playing on a new console.

So while 2012 was a wee bit bumpy, the industry is not dying.

As for 2012, check out the slideshow of the year?s top selling games.

Source: http://blog.mysanantonio.com/clockingin/2013/01/pwned-video-games-take-hit-in-2012/

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