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In this Industry Report

The thinking behind this Bulletin is to release regular updates, quarterly or half yearly depending on the data flow and market circumstances, in a similar format to enable subscribers to discern the key trends in the games publishing industry. The Bulletin will also focus in on key areas as necessary to ensure that the content remains timely and relevant.

Q4 2008 highlights:

• Despite concerns over the wider economic situation the games industry is gearing up for the biggest Christmas of the current home console generation. The combined global installed base of Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 by calendar year end is likely to be just under 90m units.
• Activision Blizzard is asserting its scale and strength in the marketplace with the largest release slate for the key Christmas period with around 35 releases compared with 25 from EA and 20 from Ubisoft. Akin to the previous quarter releases are heavily concentrated amongst the biggest publishers with the five busiest publishers in Q4 accounting for around 60 per cent of all packaged releases for Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 in the quarter.
• Looking at genre splits for all 2007 and 2008 releases reveals the impressive surge in mini game compilations especially for Wii and music games, driven by the continuing success of Activision Blizzard's Guitar Hero and EA's Rock Star games. By year end 2008 will have seen almost 40 releases of games based on each of the music and mini game genres, compared with 14 music and 10 mini game releases in 2007.

In this bulletin

• The emergence of the music and mini games genres
• Quarterly and cumulative release volumes by platform
• Quarterly release volumes by publisher
• Releases with proven historic sales
• Releases based on new IP by publisher
• Releases based on licensed IP by publisher
• 2007 and 2008 genre splits
• Releases split by the territory in which they were produced

Games Intelligence

Author/s

Ed Barton

Territories covered

Western Europe

France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, UK,

Central and Eastern Europe

Hungary, Poland, Romania,

North America

Canada, USA,

Asia-Pacific

Australia, China, Japan,

Companies mentioned