The Evening Report: Video Games Made Fewer Tons of Money, Sony Spends A Ton of Money, THQ Has No Money! Dolla Dolla Bill, Y’all!

The Evening Report: Video Games Made Fewer Tons of Money, Sony Spends A Ton of Money, THQ Has No Money! Dolla Dolla Bill, Y’all!

Cash rules everything around me…

NPD estimates $3.40B in game sales in Q1 2012

Seeing a major decline from an estimated $5.9 billion in the same period in 2011, the NPD Group report released today shows that video game consumer spending in the first quarter of 2012 was roughly $3.4 billion. This includes sales of used games and rentals as well as new product in both physical and digital forms.

You want a breakdown? We’ve got a breakdown. (This is where the ‘WUBWUBWUB’ goes, right?)

$1.5 billion – New PC and console software.
$525 million – Used software and rentals.
$1.38 billion – Digital distribution of games, add-ons, mobile software, etc.

So, how long until the third line surpasses the first one?

[Source: Joystiq]

Sony Acquires Cloud Gaming Giant

Sony has spent $380 million for cloud streaming service Gaikai, ending long speculation that Sony was going to spend a large amount of money on cloud streaming service Gaikai. It is unknown whether cloud-based gaming will be incorporated into the Playstation 3, or if this move is set them up for a more robust feature set for their next console.

[Source: Giant Bomb]

THQ Doing A Reverse Stock Split to Stay On NASDAQ

No, it’s not a gymnast’s stunt from the upcoming Olympics. “Reverse Stock Splitting” is essentially merging public shares of a company and reissuing them to the shareholders in the same proportion that they originally had. This was done to raise the value of an individual share above NASDAQ’s $1.00 minimum. THQ’s plan will employ a 10-to-1 exchange rate, going “from 68.5 million to around 6.9 million” available shares.

This is all well and good (and complicated), but I would have thought a better plan for THQ to improve its stock price might have been to publish better games? No? Thought Saints Row and Dawn of War 2 would carry you forever?

[Source: Gamasutra]