Nintendo Sells the Most New Games

The latest annual report of GameStop’s vendor relations revealed this week that Nintendo publishes the largest portion of new games they sell by a sizable margin. This is another sign of Nintendo’s uncanny ability to maintain strong game sales and how it has changed the balance of market share in the industry.

23 percent of GameStop’s non-used games are Nintendo-published titles. The closest competitor is Sony with 17 percent of the share. From there it goes down to Microsoft and Eletronic Arts (12 percent each) and then Activision with 11 percent. These five companies make up 75 percent of GameStop’s new games business.

In 2006 things were very different. Microsoft held the top spot with 14 percent, and collectively the top 10 made up only 65 percent of GameStop’s new games business. Today it’s 85 percent. It is very possible that Nintendo is the shifting force in those numbers.

Every publisher today worries about their games sales eroding into second hand market after most new sales taper off after opening month. This is a problem that Nintendo has consistently avoided.

Numbers like this bring more context to how every NPD chart of the last few years has been populated by years-old Nintendo games. It’s almost old news now that Wii Sports Resort remains on February’s top 10 NPDs more than half a year after release. The top 20 for that month however is still host to games like Mario Kart DS and New Super Mario Bros. which came out in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

At GameStop specifically, new copies of many of Nintendo’s games still maintain their original launch prices years after release. Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart Wii, and the other aforementioned games all either fall into that category or only cost slightly less used today. Activision’s Call of Duty: World At War on the other hand for instance is now only $20 new at GameStop.

There are several factors that could be putting Nintendo so far ahead in the top spot, some less obvious than others.

Nintendo is after all right now the manufacturer of by far the biggest-selling consoles on the market, so the potential number of people coming to buy their games is inevitably larger. Nintendo’s mass market strategy could also be bringing in customers less likely to buy used games.

Aside from just Nintendo however, it is alarming that almost all of GameStop’s new game sales come from just a handful of publishers. This doesn’t really indicate a stranglehold on the industry however.

This report still only represents GameStop. A real picture of publisher market share would also have to look at stores like Best Buy, Amazon, and the one store that still sells more games than GameStop – Wal-Mart.