GameStop: Increasing Percentage Of Purchases Comes From Top 5 Companies

The latest annual report from major gaming retailer GameStop reflects continuing consolidation in the game industry, with an increasing proportion of the chain's total purchases deriving from the top five manufacturers and publishers. In the 2010 fiscal year, GameStop says fully 75 percent of "new product purchases" came from the three major hardware manufacturers -- Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft -- and the two largest video game publishers, Electronic Arts and Activision. That's up from roughly 71 percent the prior year. Nintendo was the biggest chunk of that by a considerable margin, even as it decreased from 25 percent of total new product purchases to 23 percent. Meanwhile, Sony surged from 13 percent to 17 percent, as Microsoft dropped slightly from 13 percent to 12 percent. On the software-only publisher side, Electronic Arts increased its share from 11 percent to 12 percent, and Activision grew from an unspecified "less than 10 percent" to 11 percent. Those figures come courtesy of an Activision SEC filing detailing the company's fiscal performance. That document also specifies that, after the top five, the next five largest GameStop vendors add up to only 10 percent of purchases in total -- and the remaining 15 percent is divvied up among 65 companies. The retailer did not drill down into individual company rankings following the top five, so the respective shares of major publishers like Take-Two, Ubisoft, THQ, and others are not known. GameStop also indicated significant growth in its used game product sales business, up 18 percent year over year compared to only 1 percent growth in its new game product sales business. That's in sharp contrast to its previous fiscal year, which saw used sales grow 28 percent and new sales grow 32 percent.