Irish Christmas Charts: EA, Ubisoft, Sony, Konami on top; PS2 PSP dominate
PSP often out ranks Xbox 360 combined
Chart-Track’s Christmas
‘Entertainment Software’ top 20 sales chart for Ireland draw a poor
picture of the performance of the Xbox, even when combined with the
Xbox 360. With Sony’s ‘Buzz! The Music Quiz’ making it into the
top five, and three other PlayStation exclusives in the top 20, there
is little signs of the Xbox.
The reception isn’t much better when it comes to multi-format
games, with Xbox rarely receiving much more then 10% of sales of any
one games, and never above 20%. It’s much worse for the Gamecube, and
PC formats hardly ever seeing above 5%, with GBA and DS just popping
their head in around 10% in the odd game.
EA were still on top with five games in the top 20, Need for
Speed: Most Wanted at one and FIFA at two. Rival soccer game Pro
Evolution Soccer 5 from Konami was at five down from three, with this
year’s box-office tie-in King Kong from UbiSoft at three, both
critically acclaimed. While the critically dismissed first attempt at
Ireland’s national sport, Gaelic Games Football, was down to eight
from five last week, after seven weeks on the chart.
The top 20 chart continues to add independent substance to Sony’s
claims of the extraordinary console sales in Ireland, which are
importantly backed by games sales. The company says ownership of PS and
PS2 consoles per head of population is only higher in Japan.
PlayStation looks to be the game brand burned into the Irish mind, and
culture.
PSP and Xbox 360 were been billed as the ‘must haves’ by the
press. Comparing both on the charts would be unfair as the PSP is long
released. However, the PSP not only outranks the 360 with multi-format
games, but also the combined percentages for the established Xbox, and
the 360.
This is even with alleged forced bundles of games with the new 360
console. One report going as far as claiming that a manager
“physically restrained” a staff member from selling without a
bundle. Microsoft and games sellers have mostly denied forced bundles,
but when pressed retailers have admitted they are under presser.
According to a retailer who spoke to Games Toaster, pre-bookings of 360
in the same shops, as well as multiply pre-bookings in the same shops
and in multiply stores, have confused the demand for Xbox 360. He was
confident this was widespread. The mysteries second shipment just
before Christmas, that was said to be uncertain, led to consoles left
on some retailers’ shelves as late as closing time Christmas Eve.
Play.ie launched
Play.ie
was recently launched by Eirplay games. While the site is said to be a ‘media
entertainment portal’, with content such as ring tones, the company says it’s
aims is to “provide an opportunity for Irish digital media designers, game
developers and students to showcase their work”.
Room 101 setting up large-scale LAN
With the help of LAN organisers, the Irish LAN party website
Room101.org are looking at setting up a large-scale LAN multiplayer
games event. They are currently aiming to run it at the end of
February.
‘MindPhuck’ explains on Room101.org, “The idea behind the
room101 LANs is so all the attendees from the various other LANs can
get together and have a major LAN party. This will only really work if
all the gamers from the different LAN communities get themselves
involved in what could be Irelands Largest Community LAN. (as opposed
to an individual LAN entity)”.
There little information at the moment - no exact dates, no venue,
and there’s apparently ‘a large number of major sponsors
interested’. For more visit Room101.org.
Clarification: XboxIreland.com article - we used facts, we did not infer or imply
Games Toaster takes complaints seriously, so seriously
we are publishing this clarification in the same way we publish all of
our content. This post is a clarification, not a correction. At this
point, we see no reason to edit the article in question in any way.
On November 28, 2005, we published an article titled
‘XboxIreland.com launches, backed by publishers’, we have received
anonymous complaints, apparently but not certainly, from the one person
vie our comments system.
The article deals with the facts as we have established. In this
case, all such facts are available in the public domain (ie on websites, including
In the article, we do not give our feelings of support or otherwise
for the site, there is one exception to this, after the use of the word
‘Irish’ was wrongly used as ‘irish’ we inserted ‘(sic)’, this is
commonly used with in print media to display a grievance distasteful
use of the written English language. Besides this we do not infer or
imply any thoughts on how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the site in question may be.
One comment stated, “By linking their staff member to Microsoft’s
marketing company as if it means that they are biased”, we did not link
their ’staff member’ to a marketing company which works for Microsoft,
we merely publicised the fact that such a link is a realty, we said
nothing of bias. We did not infer or imply any ethically complicity of
somebody working on an ‘Irish Xbox community site’ and working directly
or indirectly for the Xbox maker. To infer (to form an opinion or guess
that something is true because of the information that you have — Cambridge),
is something the complaint did, not us, we just provided what we know
as the complete information, which we could not find on Xbox Ireland.
Another comment stated, “This quote: “Games Toaster has identified
least one person listed as a ’staff writer’ [of XboxIreland.com] as
being an employ of an Irish marketing company who works for Xbox
manufacture Microsoft. The site is billed as an ‘Irish Xbox community
site’.”: Yas make it sound as if yas have identified him from a
criminal line-up! ” To the best of our knowledge, to the term
“identified” is not solely generally associated with a “criminal
line-up”, or any other “criminal” activity. We do not believe many of
our readers will confuse our use of English in this way.
In this case, the complaints were published publicly in our comments
system, if you have a complaint and want to issue it confidential you
can email or write to us (see the contact page),
if you wish we will only publicly deal with the nature or the complaint
without quoting the whole complaint. As always you can also post using
our comments system with or without entering a name or email address.
Again, this post is a clarification, not a correction; as such, we
see no reason to edit the article in question about XboxIreland.com in
any way.