"If you come out of the gate strong, buzz can build that helps the overall sales curve," said Mike Quigley, vice president of marketing at Electronic Arts. For that reason, the industry goes to great lengths to create interest among what it calls hard-core gamers, the sort of people who will line up in front of EB Games stores on a chilly evening. Their enthusiasm can bolster a few hits with significant marketing budgets behind them, often at the expense of other games.
"There's just so many choices that things get lost in the shuffle at some point," said Richard Ow, a director of the NPD Group who follows the video game business. "There's limited shelf space and if something doesn't perform they'll replace it. A game like Halo 2 could take the space of three to five other games."
The Halo and Grand Theft series are still the outsize exceptions -- the equivalent of Hollywood's Star Wars or Lord of the Rings -- of a medium that is still maturing. But as video games move into the mainstream, the biggest games are getting bigger.
"We've never had a holiday with two games of this magnitude," said PJ McNealy, a senior analyst at American Technology Research who follows the games business.
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