Oh dear: Analyst slashes DJ Hero sales expectations by 50 percent

Interesting note regarding DJ Hero, where “interesting” means “potentially bad news.” One of those fancy analyst types, someone at Cowen and Company, has slashed sales expectations by a little more than 50 percent. That’s nothing to brush aside if you’re Activision.

Here’s the juicy part of the report:

On DJ Hero, despite some recent positive comments from company management about pre-orders, we remain very cautious about the title’s prospects at launch,” he noted. “A survey of online retailers indicates a demand profile that is well below what we would have expected to see just a few days before launch for a title that was destined to be a big (or even modest) hit. As a result, we are reducing our estimate for DJ Hero Q4 US unit sales from 1.6 million to 600,000, and we are reducing our first year estimate from 2.5 million to 950,000

Someone at Kotaku wrote, “It seems the turntables have turned on Activision,” which legitimately made me laugh.

Look, for a time I was into that whole DJ scene, and still am to an extent. That’s why I wrote what I wrote: that the barrier to entry to becoming a competent DJ, what with today’s software, is a lot lower than it is to becoming a competent guitarist. Plus, DJing is a little more niche than guitaring; who didn’t want to play the guitar growing up?

Now, the analyst isn’t saying that DJ Hero won’t sell at all, just that, based on the early hype, and the Hero brand name, it he and his company initially expected it to do better.

Or, if you want to be a cynic, you can blame Activision for burning through all these music games in such a short period of time that people are either A) tired of them or B) they’ve played enough if them, and don’t need to play any more.

In any event, the game comes out tomorrow for $120 with turntable. (Maybe the price has something to do with it, too?)

via Kotaku

Pic, of course, via Penny-Arcade