How can it be? Gaming industry dives PS3, Xbox break records

Mike Bantick
Sunday, 13 February 2011 14:14

Opinion and Analysis

The video-game industry in Australia remains healthy, but slumped 16 per cent during 2010, yet both Sony and Microsoft were pleased.  There are some simple answers for this, one of which is analysis spin, but surely somebody had a bad year.

In the Australian video-game market place 2010 was not the best of years.  In short, there were development studio closures, the strengthening Aussie dollar causing a dip in work-for-hire development, retail closures as well as console and software (apart from PC based titles) sales on the decline.

In Australia, console hardware was down by almost 30 per cent which makes the following statements from Sony and Microsoft interesting.  Let's start with Microsoft as that is the easiest.

In response to the drop off in console sales figures Microsoft said 'Xbox 360 bucked the trend in a market where total console sales declined year on year, showing 20 per cent increase in total sales from the previous year.'

Which means, given that Xbox 360 sold approximately 300,000 consoles in Australia during 2009, 2010 saw 360,000 Xbox 360's go into homes, 52 per cent of which sold during the Christmas period, with a little help from the Kinect motion sensor.

Sony saw around 272,000 PlayStation 3's shipped to Australian homes during 2009, and made the following statement about 2010's PS3 performance: 'Sony Computer Entertainment Australia (SCE Aust.) today revealed another strong performance for the total PlayStation 3 (PS3) platform which in both real and relative terms outperformed other competitive game platforms, in both value and unit growth. PS3 platform achieved the number one place in terms of value and year on year value growth, representing 27% of the approximate AU$1.7 billion industry accounting for AU$469 million across more than 5 million units of PS3 product. The latter, reflects a 41% uplift for the PS3 platform in calendar year unit sales. This solid year-on-year growth comes off the back of strong platform results the year prior, and is indicative of the continued momentum of the PlayStation brand, devices and entertainment content available in Australia.'

A 41 per cent uplift for PS3 means, by my calculations, some 383,520 PS3's were moved into the abodes of Aussies.  This indeed gives the PS3 impressive numbers for 2010.  However this still leaves just under 1 million consoles that were sold in Australia un-accounted for.  Some of these will be PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation 2 consoles, these totally approximately 170,000 units (70,000 for PSP and 100,000 PS2's), so that is about 800,000 consoles left to the Nintendo brand.

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