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In This Edition,
Wolverine drives PS5 success
Xbox falters
Bing Gordon’s new book
The business case for accessibility
Hello! Welcome back.
We did London Comic-Con last week and it was fantastic. I did all sorts of chats with industry legends past and present, including an on-stage interview with Doom creator John Romero. We recorded that one, so stay tuned for the full episode.
Today, we’ve got another bumper news/analysis edition of The Game Business, featuring games legend Bing Gordon, leading US games analyst Mat Piscatella and prominent accessibility expert Jenna ‘Jennisary’.
Enjoy.
Marvel’s Wolverine, not GTA 6, powered PS5’s sales surge
PS5 sales jumped in September boosted by superhero blockbuster Marvel’s Wolverine, according to Circana games boss Mat Piscatella.
PS5 revenue jumped 43% in the US, while unit sales in the UK were up 24% compared with the year before. And although the GTA 6 Netflix reveal generated some excitement, Piscatella believed it was Marvel’s Wolverine that was the main sales driver for Sony.
“If you look at the weekly sales cadence of accessories and hardware, the Wolverine DualSense was the bestselling accessory of the month,” Piscatella said. “The [console] bundle sold out. There weren’t huge quantities, but that really helped boost PlayStation 5 sales that particular week.
“In terms of an old-school, ‘here’s an exclusive game and we’re going to sell some consoles and some accessories with it,’ I think it’s about as good as you could hope from an IP that isn’t the level of Spider-Man.”
The week of the GTA 6 Netflix reveal did see a ‘moderate bump’ in console sales, but Piscatella noted that it also coincided with the release of NBA 2K27.
“It’s hard to parse out exactly what percentage of any lift is from one game or another,” he said. “And at the same time that happened on PlayStation, Xbox sales fell. So do people not know the game’s coming out on Xbox?”
Piscatella’s analysis is backed up by new UK data. If GTA 6 is significantly bolstering console sales already, we’d expect to see further growth in October. However, UK figures from Nielsen IQ shows that PS5 sales fell 11% in October compared with the year before.
Gears of War ‘hasn’t made a difference’ to Xbox sales
Xbox’s sales are getting worse, even after the launch of console exclusive Gears of War: E-Day.
UK data from Nielsen IQ showed that Xbox hardware sales fell 22% in October, while Circana is seeing no uplift in the US. And that’s not just with the Gears release.
“All of the new programs they’re putting into place, at least in the sales and engagement data that I look at, I’m not seeing [them] have any positive impact,” Piscatella said. “The disc-to-digital program hasn’t changed their sales of new physical software trend at all.
“Saying Gears is going to be exclusive hasn’t made any difference in terms of the hardware trend. In fact, it keeps getting worse.
“[Xbox] took Call of Duty out of Game Pass on day one. And in the engagement data I’m looking at through our player engagement tracker, basically you lost a ton of engagement on Xbox because it’s no longer on Game Pass, and you got no benefit. It’s really hard to find any signs of positivity or hope on that platform right now.”
He continued: “Everything they’re doing seems to be getting Twitter likes from the most passionate part of their fan base, but other than that, in terms of actual results, I’m not seeing anything right now. And I’m looking really hard.
“And Gears is a gorgeous game. That is a Gears-ass Gears of War game. But by making it exclusive, you chop the legs out from under its potential as an individual title in order to to boost your platform, and at least in the short term, it hasn’t made a difference.”
Xbox says that “console sales remain constrained by supply”, and that demand is currently exceeding availability. It expects a further decline in console revenue over the next three months, which covers the release of GTA 6.
Switch 2 normalises after historic run, and eyes Zelda uplift
Nintendo Switch 2 is no-longer the fastest-selling console in the US, with September revenue down 12% over the year before.
However, it’s still doing “very well”, insists data tracker Circana.
“The comps are weird on Switch 2 because it’s rare that such a successful device in its first year doesn’t have supply constraints,” Piscatella noted. “I’m not seeing anything to be concerned about in the Switch 2 numbers at all, and I’m sure it’s going to pop with Zelda.
“The price increase took effect [in September]. What they did was pretty smart. They dropped the Mario Kart World bundle, went to a standalone SKU, maintained the price point, and so effectively on shelf there wasn’t a significant price change.”
UK sales for Switch 2 remain strong. In September, unit sales for the console rose 17% over the year before, while October sales are up 2.2%.
The full reveal of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time happened in September, and Piscatella expects strong results from the tie-in console model.
“People are going to buy the hell out of the Zelda [Switch 2], and on eBay you’ll be able to find one for $4,000 if you want.”
Check out the full chat with Mat Piscatella in today’s edition of The Game Business Show.
Bing Gordon says healthcare and AI need game makers, amid layoff turmoil
Video games veteran Bing Gordon says that game makers “are more valuable than they think”, as layoffs mount across the industry.
The former EA exec and VC has released a new book this week called Everybody Wins, which he co-authored with his daughter Chloe. The book is themed around a series of subjects inspired by “40,000 note giving sessions” during his business career.
It also highlights the power of game making as a life skill that is transferable beyond the video game space.
“It’s for people who have gamers in their lives they don’t understand,” he told us in a wide-ranging interview. “Gamification is a high life skill applied everywhere. And, hey, moms, if your child is off gaming when they should be doing homework, think about that as a parental life-enhancing moment, and understand how what they’re doing connects to real life one way or another.
“For game designers, I hope people who are worried about employment in the game industry realize that gamification broadly is an enormous growth business. And the companies that I work with in education, in medicine, in health and fitness, in commerce, in agentic design, all wish that they had game makers on the team.”
“I used to tell companies back in the early 2000s, ‘if you don’t have somebody in the executive suite who grew up playing Nintendo, you’re probably not as good with consumers as you think you are.’ That’s still the case.
“People who channelled game making lessons are more valuable than they think. [The book] is the glorification of game making skills and how it can be applied everywhere.”
Gordon’s book also highlights how most people are not motivated by competition, but by cooperation.
“When we did Madden, we thought it was all about, ‘I’m better than you are and I can prove it,’ which was the tagline once upon a time. And then we found out when we started getting older people and more emotionally sensitive people into the games business, that losing has a lot more emotional weight than winning.”
“Teenage boys, when they lose [at Madden], they go, ‘Yeah, now I’m going to get even. I’m going to man up.’ But a Words with Friends player, when they lose, they go, ‘Ugh, just like real life’, and stop playing.”
The full interview with Bing Gordon will be released in the coming weeks.
“Unending loyalty” - The commercial case for audio description and accessibility
Developers that make games with enhanced accessibility features can attract “unending loyalty” from disabled gamers, says leading accessibility expert Jenna ‘Jennisary’.
In today’s edition of The Game Business Show, we spoke with Jenna about the business case for adapting games for blind and visually impaired players.
“I often run into the misconception that blind people just won’t play games. The opposite is true,” said Jenna, who works as an audio description producer at Descriptive Video Works. “It’s not a matter of ‘will a disabled person play my game?’ It’s more a matter of ‘when they do, how much is our title going to disappoint them?’”
According to surveys, a larger percentage of gamers self-identify as having a disability, compared with the general public, Jenna said.
These features can be costly to implement at first, but Jenna believes there’s a business case for their inclusion.
“In every single AAA studio that I’ve worked with and that I’ve seen, every time, they have chosen to continue and increase the breadth of accessibility features that are in their games.”
And this has created increased loyalty from a typically overlooked community of gamers.
“Players with disabilities are, unfortunately, very accustomed to disappointment when it comes to trying new titles. Even though we’ve seen an increase in accessibility features over the years, the vast majority of new titles are still closed off to a lot of players with certain disabilities. But that means that when they find a studio that is willing to ensure that their needs are met, that they can actually play the game, you are going to have an unending loyalty from that fanbase, and they are going to buy every single one of your games.”
She continued: “Normally, when new games get announced, players with disabilities have to temper their excitement, because they might not be able to get to play it. I want there to be a game, or a franchise, five years in the future, where during the first announcement, we all know we’re going to get to play that game, and we can be excited about it.”
Check out today’s Show for our full interview with Jenna.
News Wise:
Xbox revenue declined 2% for the three months ending September 30, primarily due to a 14% drop in hardware sales. First-party game performance improved due to strong results for Minecraft and World of Warcraft Forever.
Elsewhere, Xbox’s first COO Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft just three months after taking the job. Chiang was previously in charge of Mojang and Minecraft, and had been part of the company for over 21 years.
Dishonored developer Arkane has been given extra time to find a buyer by Xbox. The studio faced closure in mid-November, and now has until mid-December to find a new home.
Ghost of Yotei developer Sucker Punch has laid off 24 employees due to the state of the market and the needs of its next project.
Capcom has been hit by a data breach that affected over 11.7 million Capcom ID accounts. An ‘unauthorized third-party’ has accessed emails, birth dates, genders, nicknames, and country information. Credit card data is unaffected. 196 passwords were also changed.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance developer Warhorse Studios has experienced a “serious” cyber attack resulting in unauthorised access to both company systems and data.
Crossy Road creator Matt Hall is now in charge of Atari’s mobile game business.
Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto will be the first game developer to receive Japan’s Order of Culture award. He is one of eight recipients in the Media Arts category.
The Pokémon Company will open a retail store in London ‘by 2029’. The first of a series of permanent Pokémon Stores that will open outside of Asia.
That’s it for today’s edition of The Game Business. Join us next week for our bumper interview with Arc Raiders developer Embark, one year on from our famous interview last year.
