Geek News Roundup for 11/07/2010 – An Abundance of Record Sales

The screen shot above probably doesn’t need much introduction, unless of course you’ve managed to tune out all Call of Duty news for the past week. So in a partial bait-and-switch fashion I’m going to talk about One Piece first. In an impressive feat the 60th volume of the One Piece manga topped sales records in Japan by selling 2 million copies on its first day of sales. Previously volume 59 of One Piece held the record of 1.85 million copies sold in August. Impressive indeed. In terms of video game sales it wasn’t huge surprise when Call of Duty: Black Ops sold over 5.6 million copies between the United States and the United Kingdom on its first day of release. In contrast last year’s release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold 4.7 million copies on its launch day. The newest iteration of Call of Duty is selling well enough for analysts to predict over $1 billion in sales for this holiday season alone. So far Black Ops is off to a good start with over $360 million in sales. In RPG news Fallout: New Vegas has shipped five million copies worldwide since October in order to meet heavy demand. So far the game has made over $300 million in retail sales.

Although the sales figures won’t be in for a short while the Kinect appears to be selling quite well. The motion sensing device is readily available at many brick-and-mortar stores but is sold out online at some retailers. Despite Kinect still being mostly available consumers are willing to pay a 30 percent premium for it on eBay. Less than two weeks after Kinect’s launch the device has already been hacked. Additionally, software has been developed to make the motion gaming device work on computers, namely Macs and Linux PCs. On the Sony front the PS3 is quickly closing the 360’s lead in terms of worldwide sales. The PS3 now trails the 360 by just 3 million units compared to the gap of 4.4 million units only six months ago. In terms of software Sony is finally bringing BLEACH to the PS3 in 2011 with BLEACH: Soul Ignition. Many details are still lacking but for now it seems as if the game will be an action title instead of another Heat the Soul fighter. And if the BLEACH PSP games are any indication Soul Ignition will most likely be a Japan and Asia-only release. If action games based on shonen series aren’t your thing there’s always Final Fantasy. Square Enix has announced a major list of upcoming changes for Final Fantasy XIV. The changes might not be enough to bring back frustrated PC gamers but the changes could bode well for the PS3 version of the game.

In a sign of bad news for the music game industry Viacom announced the sale of Harmonix a mere four years after acquiring the developer. In 2006 Viacom purchased Harmonix for $175 million and for most of this year Harmonix lost $321 million for its parent company. Ouch.