GameStop Q3 Earnings Disappoint Due To Assassin’s Creed Unity Delay

GameStop has posted its third quarter 2014 earnings that is a disappointment despite the robust sales of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. While new hardware sales showed a 147.4 percent increase, the delay of Assassin’s Creed: Unity and lower-than-expected software sales attributed to a total global sales of $2.09 billion for the three month period that ended on November 1, 2014.

This is down from $2.11 billion that was posted for the same quarter last year and falls short of initial estimates that the company would post $2.2 billion for Q3. While hardware sales have performed above industry expectations, sales of new game software fell 34.4 percent in Q3 2014 compared to software sales in Q3 2013.

“Overall, most of our major product categories performed very well, but our third quarter results were impacted by Assassin’s Creed Unity moving out of October,” said GameStop CEO Paul Raines.

GameStop
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The decline in software sales, according to GameStop, is due to the strength of last year’s lineup for the same quarter which included Grand Theft Auto V, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Battlefield 4, Batman: Arkham Origins, and Pokemon X/Y.

Upon release of its Q3 2014 earnings report, stock for the company dropped by about 14 percent from $44.17 per share to $38.02 per share at the time of this article’s publication.