Although it likely feels like an eternity since quarantine started roughly back in March, we haven’t actually seen concrete sales data from many of the top, publicly traded gaming companies. We have seen snippets of sales figures regarding specific titles but for the most part many we haven’t seen just how much of an increase gaming has seen since quarantine. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about Q1 or Q2 as some companies structure their fiscal year starting January 1 and others start their fiscal year on April 1. The important thing is that we are going to be able to see a solid quarter of sales data that encapsulates gaming during quarantine for the period of April until the end of June.
Before looking into any of the specifics, it’s safe to assume that gaming has seen a massive surge based on a few key indicators we’ve seen at this point. As a matter of fact, you could extrapolate something from each of the big three as an indicator of the times. When looking at Nintendo, although they have been fairly quiet in announcing their second half of 2020 plans, we have seen sales figures on Animal Crossing go through the roof. On top of that Ring Fit Adventure was extremely hard to find, to the point that it was selling for double on the used market and trying to find a new Switch or Switch Lite during quarantine at retail has been quite challenging, although a trip recently to my local department store shows stock, which makes me think Nintendo has managed supply.
When looking at PlayStation, they have released first party entries to record success with The Last of Us Part 2 selling more than 4 million copies in its first week according to the Playstation Blog and Ghost of Tsushima selling 2.4 million copies in its first three days, setting a record for new Sony PS4 IP. Not to mention that Sony has recently announced at their quarterly earnings that they have now sold 112 million PS4 consoles.
Microsoft is fairly tighter lipped when it comes to sales figures this generation but recently on the Same Brain podcast, Phil Spencer said that since March 270 million new friend connections have been made on Xbox Live. This is all pretty staggering data, especially when you consider that sales are usually down during a console launch year as many people are saving up for their new, next generation experience.
This week many of the large, publicly traded video game companies announced their earnings, which is great to get hard evidence on how quarantine has affected gaming but also this is sometimes the place where companies need to keep investors happy with projections and announcements. Sometimes these announcements are specific and other times you can deduce information from the words that are said. This week on the VDGMS podcast we thought a closer look at Activision Blizzard, TTWO and Nintendo made sense to see how much gaming has increased and see if we can figure out anything about their futures.
