Research firm EEDAR have crunched the numbers and found out. In these graphs - the colourful kind, of course - you can see how many games are released in the final quarter of the year, how big a percentage of the year's total sales those Q4 games comprise, and how well games from each quarter are critically received.

None of this will shake your beliefs in the market to their very core, but it's interesting to see that there are a lot more crummy games released at Christmas time than any other. Stocking stuffers indeed.

Market research firm EEDAR are on-hand to help you find out. Having tracked every Xbox 360 game's score in Metacritic, they've found that 13% of Xbox 360 games average a review score of 85 or higher. That's 48 games. Leaving 49% of games scoring between 66-84%, and 38% of games scoring 65 or lower.

So odds are good she'll get you a game that's...well, if not Crackdown, then at least halfway decent.

Games At-a-Glance: Xbox 360 Quality [Edge]

According to researchers at the Nielsen Company and its Monitor-Plus advertising monitoring service, the industry spent an astounding $823 million promoting its video game wares to consumers. Hey, you gotta spend money to make money, right? Surely we wouldn't complain.

Nielsen and business intelligence and research firm EEDAR announced alongside their findings their intentions to "provide detailed analysis of historical marketing campaigns in the video game industry" as part of a long term agreement.

That means we'll probably have solid data on whether the industry will spend the better part of a billion dollars on marketing and promotion this year, something we'd be surprised to see in the lagging economy.

That $823 million may seem like a lot, but it's less than 4% of the industry's total revenue for 2008. And considering how much Rockstar Games and Valve spent last year promoting Grand Theft Auto IV and Left 4 Dead, we're wondering how the rest managed to get by.

"Currently, we expect unit sales to decline by more than 50 percent series-over-series for November," said EEDAR's Jesse Divnich, "This is coming off the October month where series-over-series units declined by more than 60 percent."

Despite this, EEDAR believe that Guitar Hero, Rock Band and maybe even Guitar Praise are around for the long haul.

"In fact, we expect Guitar Hero and Rock Band releases for the next 10 years as they will always have a large and loyal market base, just as [Dance Dance Revolution] is still today a very profitable franchise for Konami, even though that series reached its peak a long time ago."

Guitar Hero "Reaching its Peak" - Analyst [Edge]

Media/Press,

On Friday, November 21th, Forbes.com did an article on Electronic Entertainment Design and Research. The article is located here http://www.forbes.com/ebusiness/2008/11/21/games-eedar-developers-tech-ebiz-cx_mji_1121eedar.html . Unfortunately, there was a miss-quote in the article that a lot of sites noticed and reported on. Below is the line from the article.

“Only 4% of games that make it to market actually make a profit, he says. About 60% of a game's budget is spent reworking or redesigning a game. Armed with all this data, companies can make those tough calls early in the development process.”

The actual statistic is only 4% of games that enter production will return a significant profit. Of games that are released to the market, only 20% will produce a significant profit. (Source for the second sentence: Secrets of the Game Business by Francois Dominic Laramee).

We understand that miss-communications can happen, especially during phone interviews, but given the inaccuracy of the statistic and how many other sites have picked up on the story, we wanted to ensure that the major media outlets received the correct statistics on the subject.

Geoffrey Zatkin, EEDAR’s President and COO, has provided some clarity on the subject:

“Only 20% of games that begin production will ever finish. Of those 20% that are finished and released to the market, only 20% of them will ever realize a significant profit (Source: Secrets of the Game Business Francois Dominic Laramee).That equals 4% of games that start production return a significant profit.

During the concept and design process of a game, publishers and developers often analyze every feature in a game to ensure proper implementation for a successful release. At EEDAR, we believe that enough historical information is now available to aid publishers and developers during the concept and design process of a game. The EEDAR database, which now consists of over 6 million historical data points, can help remove the burden for publishers and developers from having to justify every feature in their title. Specifically, our DesignMetrics™ reports help publishers and developers by identifying early in the development cycle the correct feature combinations most likely to meet consumer expectations. This allows developers to focus more time and resources on creating a high quality and well polished video game.”

EEDAR offer a service to games publishers where they run the numbers on games in development and try to predict how they will perform. The success rates make sobering reading for any game developer.

Only 4% of games that make it to market actually make a profit, according to EEDAR's research. Somewhere in the region of 60% of a typical game's budget goes on reworking and retuning a game to make it fit for market.

"No one or two things can determine the success or failure of a game," says EEDAR President Geoffrey Zatkin. "Every game I have ever worked on, we've gone in blind as to which features would sell the game better."

Cooking Up A Blockbuster Game [Forbes]