Sewn Up - EA and Activision Account for 75% of Q3 2008 Releases

[fitbabits]

Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19988) is reporting the findings of a report published by Screen Digest. Of particular note is the fact that EA and Activision account for 75% of published games in 2008's third quarter (July through September).

For Q3 - the period from July to September - Electronic Arts is the busiest publisher in the quarter, according to Screen Digest's Ed Barton, "as it releases its extensive range of annual sports games", including multiple Madden and Tiger Woods SKUs, with around 21 releases in the quarter.

However, Activision Blizzard is close behind, with 19 SKU releases for the period - and between them, Activision Blizzard and EA will generate around forty per cent of all Q4 (October-December) and around seventy five per cent of all Q3 (July-September) packaged releases for Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
It seems to me like Activision and EA are leading the way in the move from a ridiculous Fall splurge to a more measured and spread out approach. My name is fitbabits and I approve of this shift.

Oh, and I'm not even going to comment on the quality versus quantity argument on the Wii, except to say that I'm not going to comment.

[alienchild]

This sucks aids-filled donkeyballs; EA games are not Steam'ed, and Activision doesn't exactly fill Steam with AAA products...

[Emabulator]

This sucks aids-filled donkeyballs; EA games are not Steam'ed, and Activision doesn't exactly fill Steam with AAA products...It would be nice to see EA titles on Steam, but at least a few EA titles are showing up on direct2drive. I'll take direct2drive over the EA store.

[Baron Samedi]

Grandpa's gotta shoot his load somehow.

[menage]

I'm not sure if there's a game on my list from either company.

[thomasc]

Grandpa's gotta shoot his load somehow.
What the...

[alienchild]

Grandpa's gotta shoot his load somehow.

hahaha that was just disgusting enough to be funny :p

[alienchild]

It would be nice to see EA titles on Steam, but at least a few EA titles are showing up on direct2drive. I'll take direct2drive over the EA store.

I've heard a few good things about direct2drive so I'm not talking it down, but I would much rather prefer to have all my games in one huge library. Otherwise it would be like having two different shelves in different rooms in the house, and god knows that psychological satisfaction of having MANY games available on one huge list makes me want to just get more and more and more...

And I know that I can add non-Steam games to Steam, but still, it's just not the same. Just wish they would supply movies, music and applications (like Photoshop, Cubase etc.) as well, and soon all I would need was Steam.

When I think about it, I'm glad there are multiple services. The competition is good, as long as the others have the same products available.

[ÜberJumper]

I was actually thinking that Summer makes a better release season for console games as most TV shows are in repeats. I know we've got one 48" TV in the house that we watch most of our TV on, and that's shared with the 360 and PS2, I get very little 360 time in during the new TV season, and more in the summer when there's less to watch.

[Wraith]

I think the only game from the EA and Activision's lineups that I'm interested in is Spore.

The others are published by NIS (Disgaea 3), Sega (Valkyria), Atlus (Persona 4, Luminous Arc 2), Namco Bandai (Tales of Vesperia), Microsoft (Viva Pinata 2, Fable 2), 2K (Civ4: Colonization), and Square Enix (Inf. Undiscovery, Last Remnant, Star Ocean PSP, Chrono Trigger DS).

[Justin_Bailey]

This article makes absolutely no sense. It counts separate SKUs are separate games, so the nine versions of Madden 09 count as nine games. That's almost half of the supposed 21 games EA is releasing in this period. Add in another 4 SKUs for Mercenaries 2 and another 5 for Tiger Woods 09 and that's 18 of EA's 21 games. Oh wait... that's only three games.

And then you have Activision, which has supposedly released 19 SKUs since July 1. Can anyone name any of them? Because I sure can't.