After a slow start to 2011, the video game industry showed a little bounce in February. Thanks to strong sales of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) hardware, Nintendo’s (PINK:NTDOY) resurgent Wii, and some strong game titles, the sector’s revenue was up 3% from a year ago.
Game hardware was the foundation of a strong February. Home console sales were up 10%, with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 taking the top spot. The company sold 535,000 Xboxes in February, the best-selling non-holiday month for the console since it debuted in November 2005.
Cowen analyst Doug Creutz said in a Friday note to investors that the Xbox 360 is on track to outsell Nintendo’s Wii over a 12-month period (March 2010 to March 2011) since the consoles began competing in 2006.
That’s not to diminish Nintendo’s success. The Wii had its strongest non-holiday month in some time with 454,000 systems sold. The renewed vigor of Nintendo’s machine came not from the company’s first game release of 2011 — Mario Sports Mix, which was No. 10 on NPD’s best-selling game list — but from the growing popularity of Ubisoft’s dance simulation titles Just Dance 2 and Michael Jackson: The Experience. Those games took the third and ninth spots on the top ten, respectively.
Along with sixth place Zumba Fitness: Join the Party from Majesco Entertainment (NASDAQ:COOL), Nintendo games had a surprisingly strong month, even though overall software sales were down 8% from last year.
Electronic Arts’ (NASDAQ:ERTS) games had a strong month. Science fiction thriller Dead Space 2 returned to the charts at fifth place and satirical shooter Bulletstorm took seventh place with 285,600 copies sold. Those numbers would be disappointing, but Bulletstorm was released just one day before the reporting period closed, implying that EA’s new franchise will have a strong March as well.
Take-Two’s (NASDAQ:TTWO) NBA 2K11 enjoyed its fifth straight month on the chart in fourth place. Sony’s (NYSE:SNE) military fantasy for Playstation 3 Killzone 3 took eighth, and coming in at second was Capcom’s Marvel vs. Capcom 3, a fighting game filled with Disney (NYSE:DIS)-owned Marvel Comics characters, which should be a strong seller throughout the year.
The most dramatic success of February, though, was Call of Duty: Black Ops, outselling all other games four months after its initial release. With 13.7 million copies sold, ActivisionBlizzard’s (NASDAQ:ATVI) is now the all-time best-selling game in the U.S., outpacing Nintendo’s Wii Play, according to NPD Group’s Anita Frazier.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
