Gaming Roundup: Sales OK; Movies Coming Down The Pike; LittleBigPlanet Delayed
This story was written by Tameka Kee.
Game sales hit $1.27 billion in September : That includes both consoles and games (not computer games, though) and it's down 7 percent from last year. But don't blame the economy, blame Microsoft's (NSDQ: MSFT) Halo 3. In September 2007, the game shattered records, with its 3.3 million units accounting for a third of all sales for the month. In contrast, LucasArts' Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the September 2008 bestseller, only sold 610,000 units. As for the consoles, Reuters reports that the Nintendo Wii reigned supreme, selling 687,000 units. Microsoft's Xbox 360 followed with 347,200, while Sony (NYSE: SNE) moved 232,400 PS3s.
-- Nearly a dozen game-themed movies coming down the pike : Fox's Max Payne (based on the game published by a number of companies, including Rockstar Games) premieres this weekend. No telling whether it will be a commercial successlet alone a flick that gamers don't panbut with 9 films in production or slated for release in the coming months, Hollywood is clearly still enamored with the idea of porting games to the big screen.
Fox is developing EA's The Sims and Capcom's Street Fighter IV: The Legend of Chun Li; Warner Bros. has Capcom's Lost Planet; Arad Productions is developing Sony's EverQuest and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, BioWare's Mass Effect and Namco Bandai's Pac-Man; Spielberg is trying to make Ubisoft's Prince of Persia a Disney (NYSE: DIS) franchise; and a script for Epic Games' Gears of War is in the works
-- Sony pushes back LittleBigPlanet : The game with both hardcore and casual player appeal is being pushed back by at least a week because one of the background tracks includes two expressions used in the Qur'an. Sony doesn't want to offend any of its players (Muslim or otherwise) and is pressing new copies of the disc sans track, as well as rolling out a patch, per Joystiq
By Tameka Kee