THE BUSINESS OF VIDEO GAMES ISSUE 831 FRIDAY APRIL 24TH 2015
IN PICTURES: MCV AWARDS WE LOOK BACK AT THE WINNERS OF THIS YEAR’S AWARDS P11 ‘ABSOLUTE MADNESS’: RETAIL BEMOANS SHOOTER PILE-UP THE three biggest games of the year will all come out within weeks of one another. Last week at the Star Wars Celebration in California, EA announced that Star Wars: Battlefront will launch on November 20th. The game will compete with Halo 5: Guardians (out October 27th) and Call of Duty: Black Ops III (due out in-between those two dates). All three are tipped to be the must-have titles of 2015, but UK stores have warned that releasing them so close may put off some gamers. “Absolute madness,” one leading retail buyer told MCV. “These games will be big sellers. But releasing them so close to one another will force consumers to choose, and they may hold-off preordering. I’m excited, but with such a barren release schedule during the rest of the year, they could have spread them apart a little bit.” Tesco games buyer Jon Ferdenzi added: “It’s certainly going to be a challenge at retail, but I’d rather have too many titles released than nothing at all.”
Pre-order crisis looms as 3.4m UK gamers hold off by Christopher Dring FEWER UK consumers are pre-ordering video games, MCV can reveal. 20 per cent of UK gamers say they are either pre-ordering fewer titles, or have stopped preordering altogether. This comes from a survey conducted by Ipsos Media’s GameTrack project on behalf of MCV.
The UK is the No.1 European territory for pre-orders – but it is also seeing the sharpest decline.
Nine per cent of those surveyed said they had cut back on the number of pre-orders over the last 12 months, while 11 per cent said they had not pre-ordered anything despite doing so in the past. The data also revealed that the UK is the No.1 territory across Europe for pre-orders (23 per cent of gamers say they pre-ordered a title in the last year), but it is also seeing the sharpest decline.
The reasons cited for this drop included consumers preferring to spend money on other non-gaming items and savvy gamers choosing to ‘wait for prices to come down’. Declines in pre-orders are occurring across Europe, the survey showed. For UK, France, Germany and Spain combined, 12 per cent of gamers (10.3m) have either stopped or reduced the number of titles they have pre-ordered.
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