Blame It on the Game. Nintendo and Microsoft profits down–BFD

Hang on to your tissue boxes — Microsoft says they lost money last year. You could blame this flurry of diminishing reports on the our current economic woes and you would be partially right but what about the rest of it? Could it possibly be that an overabundance of peripheral and music games, lack of  really earth shattering titles, endless release delays and poor marketing led to this general decline last year? And by the way a billion dollar company not making an extra billion — is that really bad news?

Maybe, maybe not. For Nintendo a big reason in their drop was the decline of the sales of the DS. Wii sales were also down and so collectively you have a situation where they’re not clearing a lot of hardware and frankly how many Mario games or versions of  Wii Sports or Wii Fit can you own?  For Microsoft, last year’s price drop  was a great marketing ploy and definitely sparked more people into buying consoles but let’s face it, when you’re broke $300 isn’t going to go to a new console and the only games you’re playing are the “price savings/coupon clipping/shop around game” at the grocery store.

On the plus side Xbox live boasts a membership of 23 million people which is amazing when you consider you have to pay for that gold membership and Sony’s is free. Of course Sony’s PSN isn’t anywhere near as good as Xbox Live and has a long way to go before that happens but hey, they’ve got blu-ray.

Know what all of this sounds like when you still see figures for these companies in the billions? — blah blah blah, poor us, blah blah blah. That’s right, unless they’re losing money left and right and firing so many people that Detroit looks like the land of opportunity, then all of these reports and analysis on why sales are down are a bunch of bunk.

Here’s the bottom line — even with cheaper consoles why would it matter unless there were games you wanted to play? Argue all you want about what a great year it was last year in games but go back and take a good look at the whole year. Outside of the billion dollar boon for Modern Warfare 2, how many games released last year were driving sales?

We’ve reached a point in the industry where we should be seeing a lot more quality titles coming out over the course of the year but outside of a few standouts last year, we didn’t see that many games drives sales.  Videogames are at a level of abundance that we haven’t seen since halfway through the last decade so it’s almost as if there’s no driving force behind the supply and demand. The prices are reasonable enough, you have three consoles to choose from, you can play games on phones, iPods and of course computers so what’s driving people to buy these things? And if you lump on to a lack of  compelling reasons to get you into the store, a poor economy and games that really aren’t winning people over well, you get poor sales. Did they really need a report to figure that out?

Hey console makers, call us when you have something important to report.

Blame It on the Game. Nintendo and Microsoft profits down–BFD