Tag Archives: Dorian Bloch

Chart-Track director Dorian Bloch has handed MCV a list of the top ten games on single platforms, in terms of revenue and unit sales. The list also makes note of controller sales, which you can view through the link. As far as units sales were concerned, Mario Kart Wii came in the clear winner with 3.65 million units moved, followed by Brain Training with 3.64 million units moved. In terms of revenue, Wii Fit made £110 million, while Mario Kart Wii came in second with £97 million. Get the games chart below.

More »

Chart-Track chief Dorian Bloch has said the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic before Christmas Eve weekend has disqualified it from being in the running for this year’s Christmas number one.

More »

Chart-Track’s said that the UK games market suffered a YoY decrease in January, with unit sales down by 13.4 percent.

More »

Chart-Track director Dorian Bloch’s issued a statement to VG247 confirmed that final day one and week one sales data for Modern Warfare 2 will be released after the stat-tracker compiles this week’s chart on Sunday.

Chart-Track put out a 1.23 million day one estimate for the game yesterday, a figure Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter cast doubt on last night.

Here’s the full thing Dorian just sent through by email:

Concerning the comments made on VG247, subsequently picked up on by various sites, including Gamesindustry.biz, I would like to clarify the situation concerning UK Day 1 sales of ‘Modern Warfare 2′, especially the “I don’t know how anyone could aggregate UK sales that fast”.

• The first point is that UK retailers have been at the forefront of electronic data capture for decades, which in turn allows us to capture daily sales from 99% of retailers on our panel. That’s over 6000 retail outlets plus all the etailers – currently 25 different store fronts.
• Every retailer on our panel supplies Electronic Point of Sale data. In the specific case of pre-orders through retailers with high street stores, we can and do pick these up sometimes months before a product actually launches and these are set up by the retailer to report as a specific retailer code. When the product goes live we begin to track sales on the actual barcode for that product, along with the actual selling price for every single transaction.
• In the specific case of online retailers and pre-orders, the moment they ship a product it registers as a sale in the daily transaction files we are sent. Online retailers have to ship the product in advance in order to hit the street date, so we will pick up actual sales (shipped to the customer) prior to the day 1 release. These are re-dated to day 1.

I hope that this helps to explain how we get to release an accurate day 1 sell-through so quickly. Of course, with so many retailers and stores, we will release a final figure for day 1 / week 1 sales of ‘Modern Warfare 2′ after we have produced the week 46 UK entertainment software chart, this coming Sunday. We run a Sunday-Saturday chart week, so this will cover the first 5 days of sell-through for MW2 and the date range is Sunday 8th November up to including Saturday 14th November, sales up to midnight. Because we get daily sales we actually produce the final chart each and every Sunday, with our retailers/publishers getting a full analysis of the UK market by Monday morning, 10am.

The reason why we call the 1.23m a day 1 estimate is because with so many retailers, it is always possible that some data will actually arrive later in the week, due to technical reasons or transmission problems. We will therefore release final figures as indicated above.

And there you have it. Watch for final UK figures next Monday.

Chart-Track’s defended its 1.23 million day one UK sales figure for Modern Warfare 2 in the UK, following Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter casting doubt on the number last night.

“UK retailers have been at the forefront of electronic data capture for decades, which in turn allows us to capture daily sales from 99 per cent of retailers on our panel,” said CT director Dorian Bloch, talking to GI.

“That’s over 6000 retail outlets plus all the etailers – currently 25 different store fronts.”

Pachter told VG247 overnight that Broadpoint AmTech’s Ben Schachter’s day one estimate of 7 million units for MW2 was “very reasonable… if we accept that the UK figure is accurate. My guess is that it’s not.”

Pachter himself put the day one number at around 4 million. Hit the GI link for a fuller explanation of how Chart-Track arrived at its figure.

Chart-Track director Dorian Bloch’s told VG247 that UK PS3 sales have risen over 1,000 percent on Slim’s release.

“I’m not surprised by it,” said Bloch in a phone conversation. “There’s a lot of demand for the Slim.”

The exec said that while PS3 is shown as ‘+999%’ over week 35 in week 36, the figure is actually higher.

Chart-Track just issued the following data:

• PS3 is shown as ‘+999%’ over week 35. The system is set to display +999% when it encounters huge increases, so the actual increase in PS3 unit hardware sell-through is around 11X – so 11 times what PS3 was selling the previous week. Obviously people have been waiting for PS3 Slim.
• 360 is up +29% over the same time period.
• PS3 is the lead format in week 36 and is outselling 360/DS Lite/Wii (not combined, individually – they were all selling around the same amount in week 36) by approx 3:1.
• PS3 is the lead hardware format for week 36, 2009 and the last time it did this was back in week 1, 2008.
• PS3 software sales have increased by 17% (units) over week 35 to claim 3rd place in terms of software format units behind 360 & Wii (up from 4th place in week 35).
• PS3 software sales have increased by 5% (value) over week 35 to remain 2nd by value behind 360 (was also No2 in week 35, up from No4 in week 34).

Note that PS2 Slim came out in week 44, 2004 and showed an increase of +310% over the previous week (an increase of 3X).
Comparing the sales of all PS2 hardware in week 44, 2004 and all PS3 hardware in week 36, 2009 this shows that PS2 outsold PS3 by 21%, but of course PS2 was much cheaper at that point in the life cycle (approx £100) compared to the ASP for PS3 last week (approx £244). PS2 Slim came out in the first week of November 2004 and in Q4 you woud be expecting healthier numbers for most hardware formats.

Dorian Bloch, GfK Chart-Track director, expects the digital download market for PC to be worth over $1 billion in 2009 thanks to services like Direct2Drive, Steam, and Metaboli.

Bloch estimates the market accumulated close to $600 million last year, with publisher’s relishing the idea of including sales number’s in GfK Chart-Track’s data.

“This is a huge business,” said Bloch at Develop. “The key thing for me in this is that these publishers support me in what I do and they want their sales included in the charts.

“Sega has been asking us, ‘when can we include our Football Manager sales in our charts?’ We’d like to include them, but I can’t just include one publisher’s sales, I need a balanced approach for doing that.”

Bloch said that the only way to include digital sales in the company’s data, is for a wider selection of publishers to start providing sales statistics.

Thanks, GI.biz.

MCV’s claiming that the British games market is now bigger than Japan’s, as predicted.

Chart-Track said this week that UK games has grown by 26 percent this year, meaning unit sales are now higher in the UK than in Japan.

For the first five weeks of this year, the UK console market grew year-on-year by 37 per cent in units and by 21 per cent in terms of revenues.

Chart-Track boss Dorian Bloch said British revenues could beat Japan’s cash score for the first time this year.

“I haven’t got a crystal ball, but it’s very much a possibility that the UK will overtake Japan in terms of annual software revenue,” Bloch said.

“Japan is certainly in decline at the moment, mainly down to the fact that everyone seems to have already bought a DS or PSP, so hardware sales aren’t driving software sales – although DSi is flying off the shelves. The very sudden decline of PS2 is also a factor. The Japanese market is about twice the size of ours, so there is room for manoeuvre in terms of people who had a DS four years ago and want a new handheld.”

GfK-Chart Track’s confirmed that DS is about to cross the 9 million sales mark in Britain.

“We’re approaching nine million total DS units sold in the UK,” director Dorian Bloch told MCV.

“It was at 8.8 million at the end of ‘08, so should pass that number by the end of ’09.

“That’s a hell of a lot of DS handhelds already in the market, and there are quite a few publishers successfully exploiting those numbers, especially Ubisoft. We predict that the DSi launch will stimulate more growth.”

There’s no specific date for the release of DSi in Europe as yet.

Chart-Track boss Dorian Bloch has claimed that the UK market specifically is set to deliver huge sales this Christmas, despite increasingly rocky financial conditions.

His comments were made in light of a report release today, that compared data from the US, UK and Japanese markets for the three months ending September 30.

“Taking into consideration the marked differences between the three territories, the UK market in particular is gearing up for a best-ever Q4 performance overall, even under the well-documented financial climate,” he said.

“We fully expect UK consumers to drive sales for the full year to unprecedented heights, especially considering the line-up of exciting single and multi-format new franchises currently hitting the market, not to mention the evergreen portfolio of Nintendo-published Wii & DS titles which have done such a great job of expanding the market to a far more mainstream consumer.”

Get the full thing after the break.

More »

According to this MCV piece, the first six months of 2008 have been the biggest ever. The news comes from Chart-Track, so that means no figures, unfortunately.

“In terms of overall software, including non-games, this is by far the biggest first half of the year ever,” said Chart-Track director Dorian Bloch.

There’s no other info through the link, as Chart-Track doesn’t allow anyone to publish actual numbers. Sorry about that.