What You Missed This Week in Video Games

“Game On” is The Fly’s weekly recap of the stories powering up or beating down video game stocks.

CIRCANA MAY: Circana analyst Mat Piscatella (NTDOY) “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” in the May 2023 comparable period.

May video game hardware spending declined 40% when compared to a year ago, to $202M, and is now 30% lower YTD. Through May, all current generation hardware platforms are showing double-digit percentage declines year-on-year in 2024, with Switch showing the most significant drop. Sony’s (SONY) PlayStation 5 again led the month’s hardware market in unit and dollar sales. Nintendo Switch once again finished 2nd in unit sales, while Xbox Series (MSFT) ranked 2nd in dollars. Through each console’s first 43 months in market, PlayStation 5 unit sales lead those of PlayStation 4 by 8%, while Xbox Series trails Xbox One by 13% and remains slightly behind Xbox 360.

On the software side, Sony’s “Ghost of Tsushima” was the best-selling game of May 2024 in tracked dollar sales, boosted by the release of the title on Steam during the month. “Ghost of Tsushima” generated a slightly higher consumer spending total across physical and digital game sales than did physical-only sales of Nintendo’s “Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.” Other top sellers for the month included Activision’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III,” Sony’s “Helldivers II” and “MLB The Show 24,” Microsoft’s “Sea of Thieves” and “Minecraft,” Bandai Namco’s (NCBDY) “Elden Ring,” Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) “Hogwarts Legacy,” and Sony’s “Stellar Blade.”

XBOX TV APP: Microsoft launched its Xbox TV app on certain Amazon Fire TV Sticks (AMZN) this week, with the app providing access to Xbox Cloud Gaming. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can now stream a number of Xbox video games to certain Fire TV devices. At present, the app will be available only on the Fire TV 4K Max and Fire TV Stick 4K models, and will be identical to the same app available on Samsung’s (SSNLF) recent TVs and monitors. When the launch was first announced late last month, Amazon highlighted games like “Starfield,” “Fallout 4,” “Forza Horizon 5,” and “Halo Infinite” as games users could play on Fire TV through Game Pass.

OTHER STORIES TO WATCH:

• Tencent’s (TCEHY) DnF mobile prevails amid “Genshin Impact” release, Bloomberg reports (read more)
• Jefferies double upgraded Ubisoft (UBSFY) to Buy from Underperform (read more)
• ‘Roaring Kitty’ sued for ‘pump-and-dump’ scheme with GameStop (GME) stock, NY Post reports (read more)