Analyst: November Game Sales 'Surprisingly Bad'

A statement by Banc of America analyst Gary Cooper has painted a depressing projection of November's North American video game sales, with Cooper suggesting that this month's NPD data is likely to be "surprisingly bad." Specifically, Cooper is suggesting that overall revenue will decline 30% from November 2004 figures, and singled out Activision's True Crime: New York City game and PlayStation Portable hardware sales as particular disappointments, alongside obvious shortages of Xbox 360 hardware. Official sales figures will be released at the end of this week. The most recent NPD statistics, for October, showed $365 million in total sales for the month, a figure that's down almost 25% on the previous year's figure, in a month that saw Sony's SOCOM 3 for PlayStation 2, EA's NBA Live 2006 for PS2, and Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories for PSP leading the best-selling games. Many analysts have suggested that the mature state of current-gen consoles, alongside the shortage-heavy launch of the Xbox 360, have led to transitional slumping, with U.S. retailer GameStop recording a recent loss, and citing "weaker than expected new video game software sales mainly due to core customers waiting for the launch of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and to value consumers continuing to gravitate to used video games."