Game Sales Go Soft

Last November, THQ's sales swelled to $71 million with the popularity of its game based on Pixar's (PIXR Quote) movie The Incredibles; this November, its sales fell to $48 million.

Other companies posted much better results. Activision, for instance, saw its sales jump 54% to $97 million, thanks to the latest versions of its Call of Duty and Tony Hawk franchises. EA's sales rose 8% to $143 million, led by the latest iterations of its Madden NFL and Need for Speed games.

On the hardware front, retailers sold some 325,902 Xbox 360s in the days after the device's Nov. 22 launch. Microsoft expects to sell as many as 3 million of the game machines in the first 90 days after launch.

But, coupled with widespread reports from retailers of limited supplies and back orders on the Xbox 360, the sales total is an indicator that the bulk of those sales will likely come after the holiday season.

And to put the sales in perspective, Sony sold nearly 535,000 PlayStation 2s last month, even though that console is more than five years old.

Still Sony had little to crow about. Retailers sold 353,434 units of its handheld PlayStation Portable in November. That represents about 17% of the total PSPs it had sold to date in the U.S.

But the device was edged by Nintendo's latest handheld, the DS, which tallied 369,012 units sold. And both devices were outsold by Nintendo's venerable Game Boy Advance, which saw 819,733 units sold.

Even though there were specific reasons for some of the games sales declines, the overall sales drop appears to be another bad sign for the overall industry, adding to other recent warnings that the holiday season could be an unhappy one for video-game companies.

Last week, EA warned that sales would be soft in December . Late last month, GameStop (GME Quote), the leading video-game retailer, lowered its sales outlook for the holiday season.