Best Buy to Team With Nintendo on E3 Week Wii U Promotion

More details on the game titles that will be featured and what stores will offer them will be announced “in the coming weeks,” said Fils-Aime. Best Buy is “not releasing store locations” yet, but the Wii U games featured “will be playable,” said spokeswoman Lisa Hawks.

Nintendo introduced new game systems at prior E3s, including the 3DS and Wii U, said Fils-Aime. But “this year, it’s all about the games,” he said. Nintendo decided to hold two smaller presentations at E3 this year instead of the one large news briefing it usually has each year there (CED May 6 p11). At least part of the reason for the change was apparently the company’s decision to provide much of the news about games and services that would normally be given at E3 in the Nintendo Direct webcasts that it has periodically held over the past few months. NOA didn’t say if there were other reasons for the shift in strategy, which comes as Wii U sales are struggling. Nintendo will host two smaller events -- one for select members of the media and another for analysts, publishers and retailers -- June 11, said NOA. Another Nintendo Direct webcast, focusing on future Wii U content, will “air around the time of E3,” said NOA.

NOA was mum on how the Wii U sold in April after NPD released its latest report on U.S. videogame sector sales that showed the Xbox 360 remained the top-selling videogame system in the U.S. for the 21st straight month, including handheld systems. NOA didn’t immediately respond to a Friday request for comment on April Wii U, Wii or 3DS hardware sales.

NOA instead stressed, in a prepared statement, that more than 2.1 million copies of Nintendo-published 3DS games were sold in the first four months of this year in the U.S., a 52 percent year-over-year increase. The Nintendo-published 3DS game City Undercover: The Chase Begins sold almost 94,000 combined physical and digital copies after its April 24 release, while its Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon for the 3DS sold more than 140,000 combined physical and digital units in April and has sold more than 530,000 units to date, said NOA. In its sixth month on the market, Nintendo’s New Super Mario Bros. U for the Wii U grew its cumulative sales total to almost 770,000 combined physical and digital units, said NOA.

The next videogame in the Sega videogame franchise Sonic the Hedgehog will be released exclusively for the Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo Global President Satoru Iwata said Friday in the Nintendo Direct webcast. More details about the game will be announced before E3 starts next month, he said.

It was the 28th straight month in which the Xbox 360 was the No. 1 game console in the U.S., not including handheld systems, Microsoft said in a prepared statement late Thursday. About 130,000 Xbox 360s were sold in the U.S. last month, said Microsoft, citing NPD data for April 7-May 4. The 360 had a 42 percent share of current-generation console sales and $208 million was spent on the 360 platform in April, including hardware, software and accessories, and that was the most for any console in the U.S., said Microsoft, again citing NPD’s data. Most of the month’s top 10-selling games were released for the 360, it said. Injustice: Gods Among Us from Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment was No. 1, Deep Silver’s Dead Island: Riptide was No. 2, Take-Two Interactive’s BioShock Infinite was No. 3 and its NBA 2K13 was No. 7, Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops II was No. 4 and its Skylanders Giants was No. 8, and Defiance from Trion Worlds was No. 5, NPD said. But none of those titles is a 360 exclusive.

Microsoft was again the only one of the three console makers to say how many game systems it sold and NPD stopped providing that data to reporters a while ago. Despite maintaining its lead over rival systems, 360 sales were down from the 236,000 sold in April 2012 (CED May 14/12 p7) and 261,000 sold in March this year (CED April 22 p12).

Total U.S. videogame hardware sales tumbled 42 percent year-over-year in April to $109.5 million, NPD said. “We have seen declines hover” at about 30 percent, month-over-month, in the past few years, but the March to April decline this year was “slightly higher,” at 38 percent, said NPD analyst Liam Callahan.

Total U.S. videogame industry sales of new products at retail dropped 25 percent from April 2012 to $495.2 million, said NPD. Videogame software sales fell 17 percent to $254.3 million, and were down the same percentage, to $267.8 million, when factoring in PC games, it said. Accessory sales fell 19 percent to $131.4 million. Although every accessory type saw year-over-year declines in April, sales are up more than 20 percent for the year through April on point cards, headsets/headphones, accessories for Activision’s Skylanders franchise and all other game accessories combined, said Callahan.

The game sector faced a tough comparison to a year ago because Easter “typically accounts for” a 10 percent sales “boost” in the month in which it occurs, said Callahan. Easter was in April last year but in March this year. Taking into account NPD’s preliminary estimate for other physical format sales in April, including used and rented game products at $76 million, and its estimate for digital format sales at $267 million, U.S. consumers spent $802 million on game products in April, said Callahan. Digital sales are made up of full game and add-on content downloads including microtransactions, subscriptions, mobile apps and social network games.