Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter sees music games taking in about half the revenue in 2009 that they made last year, reports Reuters. The tanking sales come despite one of the highest-profile releases to-date in the genre in MTV’s The Beatles: Rock Band. The title has sold about 800,000 units, failing to meet expectations of moving a million or more in its debut months. Solid fare from Activision’s Hero line such as Guitar Hero 5 and DJ Hero, which broadened the genre into club music, also failed to inspire gamers to pump money into the category.
Pachter predicts that ultimately music game revenues for the year will be around $700 million compared to $1.4 billion in 2008. He sees part of the problem in the genre’s initially explosive adoption by gamers. Pachter says poor performance by content as broadly appealing as The Beatles shows consumers might be facing a glut, essentially with more music in the market than they can handle. He suggests the category is settling into a consistent market of about $500-600 million a year. Reuters says the decline in music game sales is also being felt in the music industry, where once music tracks featured in games saw sales spikes of their own. The effect has been much more subdued for tracks included in recent titles.
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