GME closing stores doesn’t matter. I have crunched the numbers and looked at stores vs sales and what effect the new console cycle has on sales. The Wii U has been confirmed, personally I thought after this cycle msft and sne would not give Nintendo a head start. My read on it is that the Wii was so game changing that msft and sne wanted to see what the Wii U has and reverse engineer it. In the rumor mill I have read articles saying the next xbox has tablets I see that as more probable than not having a disc drive. Msft has come out and said they want to control your living room so I don’t know why they would try to alienate people by not having a disc drive or used games.
Numbers follow as: year, number of stores, store percent increase/decrease from previous year, sales, sales percent increase/decrease from previous year. Note: store count starts at October 29, 2005 as that as all I could find on edgar, if you know the number of stores post it. Sales are in billion and for the year.
Year, Store, Percent, sales, percent,
2002, n/a, n/a, 1121.1, n/a,
2003, n/a, n/a, 1352.7, 21%,
2004, n/a, n/a, 1578.8, 17%,
2005, 4416, n/a, 1842.8, 17%,
2006, 4490, 0.016, 3091.8, 68%,
2007, 4778, 0.064, 5318.9, 72%,
2008, 5264, 0.1, 7094, 33%,
2009, 6207, 0.179, 8805.9, 24%,
2010, 6450, 0.039, 9078, 30%,
2011, 6670, 0.032, 9473.7, 4%,
2012, 6627, -0.006, 9550.5, 0.80%,
IMO there is no correlation between adding stores and sales. Sales do better when new consoles are released. The Wii U is the answer. I think the Wii U will do well for a number of reasons. More involvement from third party publishers, pent up demand, backwards capability Wii U can play Wii games. (good for used sales).