One of the cherished traditions for people in and around the North American videogame industry is the mid-to-late month release of the previous month's sales figures for both hardware and software. Much like Hollywood with the weekend box office or the music industry with SoundScan, this data, compiled by the Port Washington, NY-based NPD Group, is the subject of much scrutiny, speculation and analysis as everyone tries to figure out What It All Means.Having engaged in many phone, email and IM back-and-forths with various people over the NPDs, as they're generally referred to, we decided to bring some of those often unheard discussions to light with our occasional feature, Monday Morning Quarterback. Our returning opponent is the prolific journalist and TV host Geoff Keighley, pitting his BlackBerry-fueled insights against our Palm-enabled observations. But this month, we not only have a special guest who joins us as a color comentator--who could it be?--we're also introducing a new concept, sparked by an offhand comment of Keighley's: the Dead Pool. Some excerpts:

Special Guest: Xbox 360 should be killing out there, but it isn't. Nintendo is making money for Nintendo like always, and Sony is still figuring out how to start the engine. Thankfully, this holiday season is going to bring lots of fantastic games to the market, but unless Sony does something quick, Microsoft and Nintendo will reap all the rewards. Which puts Sony in a bit of a pickle, because its games already feel slightly rushed to market (see: Lair and Heavenly Sword), and it has put itself in a position to hurry titles out this holiday season to try and stay competitive (which is never the right answer in my book; make the game great, then figure out which quarter it goes in, not the other way around).

Geoff Keighley: Actually we should talk about that phrase for a second--"sent to die." I read it on a forum a few months ago when gamers were discussing which games won't be getting a fair shake because of the overcrowded market. Let me ask you: which games do you think we might need to add to our death pool for the holidays? I'm particularly worried about EA's Army of Two and Midway's BlackSite: Area 51--two games that should be fun to play, but may get lost.  And what about Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed? Is it really going to post huge sales numbers? Given the awards and number of times the trailers have been downloaded there's huge interest in the game. But will that translate into a BioShock-sized month one for the game in November? Or will Assassin's suffer the same fate as many other Ubi games that are critical grand slams but only end up delivering solid doubles in terms of sales. I thought this would be a huge year for Ubisoft, but with Splinter Cell slipping to 2008 (and the quality of Haze an open question mark), a lot is resting on Assassin's.

N'Gai Croal: You're playing it safe with such obvious choices. I'm going to go out on a limb and nominate the console versions of Half-Life 2: The Orange Box. You might think I'm crazy, but hear me out. HL2:TOB might be the most value ever packed into a single case: Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. I bet if Valve could have figured out a way to toss in a gravity gun and a crowbar, they'd have done so. But by throwing so much into the package, HL2:TOB comes across as completely unfocused, especially compared to its chief competitors like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, so positioning this product becomes a major challenge. Especially for a franchise that's still primarily identified as a PC game. I find myself wondering if Valve might have been better off removing Team Fortress 2 from the Orange Box and releasing it in January or February as a separate game, with a short "Dirty Dozen"-style campaign mode that would leverage the phenomenal character work that they've been doing in their Pixar-esque promotional trailers.

Click on the link below to uncover the identity of our first guest QB, and to read our exchange in its entirety.

 

Beyond3D: Nintendo released no information about the Wii beyond codenames for the chips (Broadway for the CPU and Hollywood for the GPU) and the process node that the chips were built on (90 nanometer, the same as their contemporaries). Through some lengthy investigations, we can now say for certain that there was no major leap in either performance or functionality compared to the GameCube. Instead, Nintendo decided to define the Wii entirely by the new controller....To summarize, while the PS3 and the Xbox 360 are both at least an order of magnitude faster than their predecessors, the Wii has the processing power of one-and-a-half GameCubes with no noteworthy increases in functionality. This was done for two reasons: backwards compatibility with the GameCube and, more importantly, the very low cost. Developers have even told us that the transition guide (for GameCube developers moving to the Wii) is ten pages long and contains only very minor changes.

To read Beyond3D's analysis in its entirety, please click on the link below.

 

Note: This email exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo originally ran on N'Gai Croal's Level Up and MTV's Multiplayer blog, in four separate installments, from September 17th-20th 2007. We now present it here in its entirety, under a single permalink, for easier printing, emailing and archival purposes.

1. EGO...trip: Will our heresy ever be forgiven?
2. OUT...Halo 3 reviews are streaming in
3. JAM...Fret Nice, the guitar-based platformer
4. HMM...Do games need landmarks?
5. BOO...Anti-game activist targets Halo 3
6. HAH...How to punish gold farming
7. RND...Free at last, free at last