New Game Plus (September 9 - 15)
Nintendo Ring Fit
The successor to the Wii Fit is here. Last week Nintendo teased a new exercise gaming peripheral or as it’s better known exergaming. This week Ring Fit Adventure was announced officially. It features a lot of what you would expect from the people that brought you Wii Fit and Wii Sports. First if you havent seen the official video from Nintendo, you should check it out, there is no way two people are this happy to exercise.
Ring fit adventure works by using a leg strap that you attach one joycon to and a resistance ring that you hold and attach the other joycon to. The resistance ring is called the ring con and features technology throughout it that can determine if you are squeezing, pulling, lowering or raising or anything else the game might ask you to do with it.
The elevator pitch is that you are on an adventure and how you move through the world and defeat enemies is with exercise. The moves range from jogging on the spot, exercises like squats, core movements and even yoga positions.
Ring fit adventure comes out on October 18th and will see you battle enemies across 20 worlds or if you don’t want to play the adventure game you can just a variety of other modes including quick play or sets which can skip the whole game portion and allows you to just exercise. The game itself doesn’t look like it could convince people to play who aren’t interested in exercising but it is a novel idea that could make working out fun for those who already do or want to start.
GameStop Q2 Earnings Report
This week GameStop reported their second quarter financial results and as expected things weren’t great. Unfortunately, they were even worse than projected. Almost every major category was down except for collectibles, those were up 21 percent. So clearly as much as people say they don’t like them, Funko and amibos are selling very well.
New software was down around 5 percent which would have been much worse if not for the Nintendo Switch offsetting the other consoles. As always the bigger area of concern for the company is it’s used market. GameStop rise to power was based on the used gaming market and being able to sell the same game multiple times. As you know times changed and digital as well as live service games are now the norm. Preowned sales were down almost 20 percent when looking at the software and hardware combined. Digital sales decreased a little over 10 percent because who is really buying a digital game or additional content from GameStop. You can do that right on your system and buying it from GameStop just doesn’t make sense. Accessories were down around 10 percent but the big number was that new hardware was down 41 percent. If there is one thing GameStop should be able to do, it’s to sell new hardware because you can’t buy that digitally and sometimes you don’t want to wait for Amazon to deliver. Although according to Jim Bell “these trends are consistent with what we have historically observed towards the end of a hardware cycle”
These could be true for hardware sales but it seems harder to believe that game sales near the end of a console cycle would be down. This is the time when most games are available for the system. It’s a video game cornucopia towards the tail end of the cycle. You can buy anything that your heart desires.
After the financial report, Jim bell, GameStop CFO announced the next wave of restructuring which includes closing down 180-200 stores. Worldwide the company has about 5700 stores with about 4000 being in North America. Jim bell continued on to say that these stores were underperforming and closing them was opportunistic. This means that these areas were either drastically underperforming or they had land leases that were expiring and no longer made sense or any other factor that might have made the decision easier to identify.
There is the expectation that a much larger group of stores will be closed over the next few years. The next wave of stores will come from much deeper analysis as Jim bell said over the next much larger closures “we are applying a more definitive and analytic approach including profit levels and sales transferability”
Last of Us 2
This week Naughty Dog sent out invitations for a Last of Us 2 event happening on September 24th. Geoff Kieghly posted the invite to his twitter account. It’s a Tuesday and it’s a little mystery to me why this event didn’t happen on the 26th which is Outbreak Day. Outbreak Day is September 26th which is the day in the game that the outbreak took over. Typically every year since the release of the game, naughty Dog uses the day to release special promotions, merchandise or content related to last of us. Tangent aside it’s safe to assume that we are going to see some new gameplay and most likely a release date. Last of Us 2 might not have another chance where it would have complete media focus if it’s going to be released for the PS4. There isn’t much else to say other than put this date in your calendar if you are a fan of the series.
August NPD
As usual around the middle of the month we get gaming sales data of the previous month from the NPD group. These are just the personal highlights that I came across as relevant to me, but you should go check out the whole video on Mat Piscatellas YouTube.
All of the data is from August 4 though August 31 and overall there are a many things this month that stand out. Sales for hardware, software and accessories were all down from the same period in 2018, with the software sales in being the lowest August since 1998.
The best selling game was Madden for the second month in a row despite its buggy reviews. It had little to no competition for the month of July and August and is now the 3rd best selling game of the year.
The big surprise of the year was that Minecraft was the 2nd best selling game of August which just goes to show how little new games were available for most of August. The only new release that placed the in the top 10 was the Nintendo Switch exclusive, Astral Chain, which placed 10th overall. Two of the bigger games that came out in August in my mind were Man of Medan and Control. Supermassive’s spiritual succesor came in at 19th, which is a little unfortunate as this is what the fans have been asking for from this studio.
The much bigger piece of news from this data was that Control didn’t even place in the top 20. This could have been a game that needed word of mouth and reviews to generate hype as it didnt receive the biggest marketing push. It did come out at the very end of August so we will have to see where it places for the September report when it has a full month to generate sales. Although it will be facing much stiffer completion from games like Gears 5, Borderlands 3 and Links Awakening. The thought was that moving to Multiplatform would have helped the studio but when the Xbox Exclusive, Quantum Break, was released it came in at 7th on the NPD report for the month it was released.
Speaking of Nintendo, they continue to keep generating sales and dominating the charts with 10 of the top 20 being exclusive to the Switch
Borderlands 3 Shady Review Strategy
This week Borderlands 3 was released. The last entry from that series was back in 2014 with the pre sequel if you don’t count the telltale games.
The review embargo lifted earlier in the week with a few sites like Game Spot and IGN releasing their reviews which were favorable with 8 and 9 respectively. As always I try to avoid reading reviews until I am finished with the game and my review if I plan to review it. I am still unsure if I will review this game but top level from media is that this game is a lot more of what you love about the series
One thing I noticed earlier in the week when the embargo lifted was that there wasn’t too many sites with reviews up. At first, I just assumed that since it was a longer game with endgame content they were in the middle of the reviews however as the week went on, I learned that wasn’t accurate. First an article popped up on Kotaku, from Jason Schreier, who explained the review situation from their outlets point of view. Kotaku had requested a review copy of Borderlands 3 but didn’t receive one due to what 2K called “security concerns” This would make some sense if they just didn’t send out any review codes at all, since they have had some leaked gameplay be a problem over the past few months. However, other outlets said that upon reaching out to 2K and asking why they didn’t receive codes the answer was that based on previous coverage of the series they would be receiving their review codes closer to launch. This is where the truth starts to become a little more obvious with 2K trying to make sure that the game has the best possible score on launch day to generate as many sales as possible by only sending out codes to outlets that have been very positive on the series in the past. The whole idea of only sending out to people that are most likely to give it a glowing review just comes across as very dishonest. Although in todays day and age of sales this just seems to be the nature of the business now.
Resident Evil Resistance
Last week we talked about the tease from Capcom about the newest entry in the Resident Evil series. It was teased earlier in the week with a full reveal at the Tokyo Game Show. From what was dug up last week, from data miners, it looked to be a in a similar vibe to Resident Evil Outbreak or something new, possibly along the lines of Left 4 Dead.
After the trailer was shown earlier in the week it featured a very “Cabin in the Woods” vibe by showing 4 protagonists trying to survive while the antagonist sits in a control room and designs your level. This lead to a lot of speculation if it would just be a co-op survival game like Outbreak or if it would be something completely different featuring 4v1 asymmetrical gameplay. The way they showed a tyrant being controlled by someone in a booth, it looked like they were trying to emphasize the aspect of controlling the enemies.
Sure enough by the end of the week, we got a reveal from TGS and it will be a 4v1 game. I saw a feature on IGN where the team there got hands on with it and were able to feature some gameplay. I personally don’t think it looks too great, but it has some positives. It is using the RE engine which is a fantastic looking engine that plays really well including RE7, RE2, and the latest Devil May Cry to name a few. The other thing is that Capcom has been pretty successful as of late so I am going to trust that they believe they have a great product or they woudln’t be releasing it, possibly doing harm to the franchise that they have slowly rebuilt and given credibility after RE6. It was noted during the video that it won’t be a full price title, which is a smart idea as it looks more like an add or an alternate mode. My assumption based on the gameplay that I have seen is that it might be around 30 bucks and at that price point it has a chance for success. If you havent had a chance to see it in action then head over to IGN who have a nice in preview of the game with plenty of gameplay footage.