Pachter: Slow April game sales suggest "something is terribly wrong"

Before particularly nasty natural disasters, there's this phenomenon where animals somehow see it coming and find high ground atop a hill or something of the like.

See that hill over there? There are analysts gathered atop that hill. The end times are near.

"The April sales results are baffling to us," Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter told IndustryGamers. "The dollar sales level of $399 million is the lowest since May 2007, when this generation was barely underway, and is the weakest April result since 2005, when console software sales totaled only $6 billion for the full year. The sequential decline of 54% is the greatest in the 11 years that we have been tracking monthly data (except for December-January declines), dwarfing the previous record of 42% set in March-April 2002."

"It’s easy to blame the lineup, which was quite light (Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell Conviction was the only AAA title, and it was an Xbox 360 exclusive), but the results suggest something is terribly wrong."

But, as videogames have taught us, when something goes terribly wrong, we simply need to hide behind cover for a couple seconds and wait for things to get better. Or at least, that seems to the conclusion Pachter's reached.

"We do not believe that core gamers suddenly shifted allegiance to Facebook or iPhone games in April, nor do we believe that Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 online play increased dramatically during April. As we cannot explain the reasons for the shortfall, we can only conclude that April was a fluke, with many core gamers enjoying recently purchased games and looking forward to new releases coming out in May."

See? A bit anti-climactic, we think. If something goes "terribly wrong," we want fire and tornadoes and the movie 2012 with all its special effects and none of its plot.