Analysts: November game sales up slightly

Later this week, the NPD Group will report on US retail sales performance for the month of November. While the NPD numbers typically offer a reliable year-over-year comparison on how the industry is doing, November's tally will be slightly problematic. Whereas November 2007 included roughly a week of post-Thanksgiving sales, last month included only 48 hours of the all-important shopping season.

Despite the skewed comparison, a pair of analysts agree that software sales will continue their upward climb by 5 to 7 percent. Coming in on the high side of estimates, Wedbush Morgan Securities' Michael Pachter believes the industry took in $1.4 billion in sales during November.

There were no surprises in what drove sales for the month, according to Pachter's assessment. Activision's Call of Duty: World at War sold an estimated 2 million units in the US during the month. Other top performers included Guitar Hero World Tour (900,000 combined units), Rock Band 2 (350,000), Wii Fit (750,000), and Gears of War 2, which Microsoft boasted sold 3 million units worldwide earlier this month.

Because NPD's report only includes console and handheld software, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King won't factor into the month's tally. Be that as it may, Pachter believes the game sold like gangbusters, shifting 1.7 million units in the US. (Shortly after its release, Activision said the game had sold a record-setting 2.8 million units worldwide in its first 24 hours.)

Pachter also took a crack at hardware numbers. The Wedbush Morgan analyst believes that Nintendo has at long last delivered on its promise to ramp up Wii production and will subsequently see 1.4 million units of the popular console flying off shelves. The Xbox 360 will continue to capitalize on its price cut from September, Pachter believes, with an additional 800,000 units selling in November. The PlayStation 3 is also expected to see a small uptick in sales, with Pachter predicting 400,000 units sold on the month.

Pacific Crest Securities analyst Evan Wilson saw November shake out in much the same way. In all, Wilson predicts a 5 percent year-over-year growth in November (again, due to the shorter reporting period), with total US software sales topping out at $1.37 billion. However, the analyst notes that were the reporting period normalized against last year, software sales were actually up 18 percent.

While many of Wilson's software unit sales predictions were in step with Pachter's, the Pacific Crest analyst was a bit more bullish on Call of Duty: World at War. Thanks largely to an increased console installed base and a strong precedent established by Call of Duty 4, Wilson believes World at War shifted 2.25 million units in its debut month, outpacing its higher-rated predecessor by a full 200,000 units.

Wilson also called out the commendable performance of the EA Partners-published, Valve-developed Left 4 Dead, labeling the shooter's 350,000-unit showing a "positive surprise." The analyst, who has been critical of EA in the past, also took the publisher to task for not further capitalizing on the title's potential by porting it to the PS3.

"One of EA's biggest mistakes for the holidays is that it--not Valve--was primarily responsible for getting Left 4 Dead ported to the PS3 for the holiday season, but the company could not or did not due to resource constraints," said Wilson. "Given the game's sales, it would have been a surefire hit, although it would have had a lower margin because the intellectual property is externally owned."