Activision: Music Game Sales To Be Higher This Holiday Season Than In 2008

In a Gamasutra-attended conference call following Activision's third-quarter earnings results, company CFO Thomas Tippl said the company expects this holiday season to bring stronger music game performance for Activision than last year's holiday season did. While the music game genre has seen slowing in some areas this year, largely due to softening hardware sales, Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith noted that, at least on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms, core users "continue to be very engaged, and in fact, consumer sell-through on these platforms is up 20% year over year for 2009 to date across the United States and Europe." The exec called DJ Hero "our first step toward diversifying beyond rock" into the rap, hip-hop, and electronic genres, which Activision considers an important step in maintaining growth in the music game category. That comes despite fairly mild commercial response to recently-released DJ Hero so far. Activision says it only just started its full-scale marketing campaign during the World Series, and it plans to continue to ramp up those efforts as the holiday season approaches. "We sold-in all we could produce at launch, and we're now focused on sell-through and replenishment orders for the holiday and beyond," Griffith said. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick also weighed in on the FreeStyleGames-developed title, saying it had a "successful launch" and calling it "one of the most innovative products we've ever created." Even more recently, Activision launched its latest sister series to Guitar Hero, Band Hero, which Griffith said is part of the company's strategy to broaden the reach of music games. "This segmentation between Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, and Band Hero gives us a solid foundation to establish and build stronger loyalty among different segments of the genre," he said. [UPDATE: Responding to an analyst inquiry about Activision's music game performance in Europe, Griffith said the company has made considerable effort to build its Hero games overseas. "It's much more evenly balanced now with respect to our historical ranges," Griffith said. "We've had roughly two thirds of our business in North America and a third in Europe, and that's probably about the pattern that will play out with Guitar Hero 5 and DJ [Hero]." He also said that, because the music game market in Europe is less established, hardware bundles have been more successful in that region on a relative basis than in North America, where the segment is increasingly shifting towards software. Added Kotick, "Against some of the competition, we've substantially overperformed [in Europe], and what we're starting to see is our song selection, our access to the Universal song catalog and other partners...and gameplay characteristics more appealing to international consumers, is really paying off."]