MTV Multiplayer – Numbers

'Wii Music' U.S. Launch Sales One Tenth Of 'Wii Fit' Debut Mark, Nintendo Not Panicking

Posted 11/14/08 1:00 pm EST by Stephen Totilo in Music Games, Numbers, Top Entries, Wii, Wii Fit, Wii Music, Wii Play

First month sales of Nintendo's newest Wii-branded game, the ambitious and unusual "Wii Music," released last month fell far short of the mark set by May's "Wii Fit" in its first month.

But Nintendo is not expressing concern yet.

"You'll see in [the NPD sales] that it did about somewhere [like] 65 or 66,000 based on our internal numbers for the two weeks that was reported," Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo's executive vice president of sales and marketing, told Multiplayer in an interview at the New York Grand Hyatt yesterday.

By comparison, NPD reported that "Wii Fit" sold more than 687,000 copies in its first month of sale.

These aren't blockbuster numbers, but Dunaway offered an explanation for the game's performance: Read More...

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Wii Software Stats Update: October Edition Of 'Smash Bros' Domination

Posted 10/13/08 5:04 pm EST by Stephen Totilo in Numbers, Top Entries, Virtual Console, Wii, Wii Software Stats, WiiWare

*The average "Super Smash Brother: Brawl" owner in America has played the game more than 61 hours since the game's February release.

*The average "Wii Fit" consumer has played that exercise game more times than the average "Okami" fan has played Capcom's wolf action-game.

*And "Sin & Punishment," a Nintendo 64 game that was never sold on a cartridge but just had a sequel announced for the Wii in part on the strength of its sales as a downloadable game through the Wii has sold more than 29,000 copies through the Wii Virtual Console.

These are just some of the findings in our second (well, third, sort of) number-filled breakdown of Wii software usage stats. We're dong this monthly and we can pull numbers for any Wii game that's been out for at least a month. Who needs NPDs?

See below to learn a LOT about the performance of 14 Wii games, from "Boom Blox" to "Guitar Hero III" to "Rock Band" to... does anyone play those WiiWare games?

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PSP Tops DS In Our Informal Year-Long Subway Test

Posted 6/25/08 9:08 am EST by Stephen Totilo in 3DS / DS, Numbers, PSP, Top Entries

There is one place in America where the PSP has maintained a clear popularity over the DS over the past year: the New York City subways that I ride.

Look over to the right of this blog and you'll see the Stock Report, a tabulation of some of some bits of info, including a count of every handheld gaming system I saw on the subway in the past year. That's right: I didn't see a single Tapwave Zodiac. And I saw almost three PSPs for every two DSes.

The official MTV Multiplayer count is: 67 PSPs, 44 DSes, and 6 GBAs witnessed by me between 6/15/07 and 6/15/08.

What's this mean?

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Analysts: PS2 Not Dropping To $99 Any Time Soon

Posted 4/28/08 6:00 pm EST by Stephen Totilo in Big Business, Numbers, PS2, PS3

When Will The PS2 Cost $99? Late last week Patrick and I sent an essay question to a couple of gaming's most knowledgeable and quotable financial analysts.

We wanted to know when they thought the PS2 would drop in price to $99 in the U.S.

This was our full question:

Sony dropped the price of the first PlayStation to $99 in 1999, four years after the system's release. The PS2 has been out since 2000, and in almost double the time, still has not dropped to $99. There are many reasons for this: lack of competition for the PS2 in the back half of the last hardware generation; Sony's struggles getting the expensive PS3 off the ground; etc. The question is: Do you think the PS2 will go down to $99? When and why?

In short order, we heard back from Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities and Evan Wilson of Pacific Crest Securities.

Neither gave us reason to expect a price drop any time soon. And one of them gave us two games to blame: "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band."

On Thursday evening, Pachter left us a voicemail, in which he said:

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Exclusive Memory Breakdown - See Exactly How The Parts Of Xbox Live's 'Undertow' Fit Together

Posted 11/19/07 8:38 am EST by Stephen Totilo in Charts, Numbers, Top Entries, Xbox 360

How much space do the graphics of a game occupy?

What about the explosions? The fonts for all the languages for all the nations where it ships?

The theme song?

I've long wondered these things and recently found video game developers who were willing to break things down for me.

Satisfying me -- and hopefully your -- curiosity at long last are the Mustard brothers, Donald and Geremy, creators of this Wednesday's Xbox Live Arcade twin-stick shooter "Undertow."

They have provided Multiplayer an exclusive breakdown of how much room everything from the explosions to the theme song to Captain Nemo's submarine occupy in their nearly 50 MB game (49832KB).

I think they wanted to show off, because their game packs a lot for being just a Live Arcade download: 15 levels single and co-op campaign, a storyline, 16-player multiplayer modes. How'd they cram it all in?

( Click here for a chart that reveals all. Dear gamer, I don't think you've ever seen anything like it. )

And what exactly were the largest and smallest files in the game? They didn't hold anything back.