Total software sales were $267.8 million, down 17% from 2012.  Hardware sales fell by 42% to $109.5 million. Accessories sales for the month totaled $131.4 million – a 19% year-on-year decrease.

NPD analyst Liam Callahan commented “When taking into account our preliminary estimate for other physical format sales in April such as used and rentals at $76 million, and our estimate for digital format sales including full game and add-on content downloads including microtransactions, subscriptions, mobile apps and the consumer spend on social network games at $267 million, the total consumer spend in April is $802 million.”

Looking at the software charts, Injustice Gods Among Us from Neather Realm came out top. According to Callahan, the titles launched in April 2013 fared better than games that launched in April 2012, up 118% in unit sales and 130% in dollar sales.

The top ten games are as follows:

1. Injustice: Gods Among Us (PS3, Wii U, X360)
2. Dead Island: Riptide (PC, PS3, X360)
3. BioShock Infinite (PC, PS3, X360)
4. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (PC, PS3, Wii U, X360)
5. Defiance (PC, PS3, X360)
6. Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon (3DS)
7. NBA 2K13 (PC, PS3, PSP, Wii, Wii U, X360)
8. Skylanders Giants (3DS, PS3, Wii, Wii U, X360)
9. Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins (3DS)
10. MLB 13: The Show (PS3, Vita)

According to the games publisher, the “under-performance” of  key titles such as Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs were a prime reason for the loss. The company labelled the North American and European console market as ”increasingly competitive and oligopolistic”. Square Enix also acknowledged that it’s restructuring efforts, including the departure of CEO Yoichi Wada, contributed to the losses.

The company’s Digital Entertainment segment, which covers all of its video game products, posted operating income of ¥44 million ($433k), down 99.7% on the previous fiscal year.

Revenue for the fiscal year was ¥148 billion ($1.45b), up 15.1% from sales of ¥127.9 billion last year. Square Enix is projecting revenues of between ¥140 billion and ¥150 billion and a net profit of between ¥3.5 billion and ¥6 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2014.

The company’s financial report reads “The business environment surrounding the Group is in the midst of major changes, where devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs are spreading rapidly, while the console game markets in North America and Europe are increasingly competitive and oligopolistic. In light of such environmental changes, the Group is focusing all efforts on a substantial earnings improvement through driving reforms of business structure in order to establish new revenue base.”

Loki Studios which was co-founded by students from Stanford University, is focused on “combining engaging game design with the features unique to the next generation of mobile devices.” Geomon, which is a location-aware game, is the company’s flagship application.

Loki Studios’ made the announcement on their website “We are thrilled to be joining the exceptional folks at Yahoo!. We believe fully in their commitment to creating outstanding mobile products. We are excited to learn from, work with, and contribute to one of the most well-known pioneers of the tech industry”.

Last week  Yahoo also snapped up polling service GoPollGo and flight rewards app MileWise.

Worldwide net sales increased by 7.3% to 487 billion yen ($4.9 billion) — up from last year’s earnings of 434 billion yen. The company’s net income for the year ending March 31, 2013 increased from 19.3 billion yen to 32.4 billion yen ($327 million).

Net sales of Namco Bandai products in Japan increased 7.3% year-over-year to ¥406 billion ($4.1B), while sales rose to ¥33.6 billion ($339M) in America, a 38.3% year-on-year increase.

Namco Bandai also announced a  failure to meet shipping targets for some of its key titles including Tekken Tag Tournament 2 worldwide which came up short at 1.5 million. The Japan-exclusive RPG Tales of Xillia 2 shipped 500,000, missing its initial target of 650,000 units.

Source: Namco Bandai

Total consolidated revenues were ¥44,364 million ($7.2 billion) , a 46% year-over-year increase. Operating income was ¥20,716 million ($3.3 billion) , a 24% increase year-over-year, with net income of ¥15,150 million ($2.5 billion).

Seungwoo Choi, President and Chief Executive Officer of Nexon commented.“We are pleased that our first quarter results exceeded the high end of the outlook we provided last quarter, primarily due to better-than-expected performance in China and strong results in Korea, as well as a favorable currency environment. Additionally, the acquisitions of gloops and inBlue have positioned us as a major player in mobile, adding significant revenue to our business, content updates to our major PC games were well-received by players around the world, particularly a tier 1 update for Dungeon&Fighter in China. We also successfully launchedFIFA Online 3 in Korea during the quarter, and the game is showing strong performance in terms of both user metrics and revenues.”

Nexon expects second quarter 2013 revenues in the range of ¥27.2 billion to ¥28.4 billion for PC and ¥6.8 billion to ¥7.5 billion for mobile. In the PC business, management expects the solid performance of existing titles in China and Korea to contribute to year-over-year revenue growth. In the mobile business, management expects performance of existing titles, including those launched in first quarter 2013, to continue to gain momentum towards the latter half of 2013.

During the second quarter, Nexon expects to launch Dragon Girls in Korea on Kakao and Guardian Break (Royal Tactics) in North America both as native applications.

EA’s net revenue was $1.21 billion for the first quarter 0f 2013, a decrease of 11.6% year-on-year. Net revenue for the fiscal year ending March 31st 2013 was $3.8 billion, down 8.4% year-on-year. Net income for the full year was up by 28.9% to $98 million.

EA was the #1 publisher in Western retail markets in the March quarter, and the #1 global publisher in the iOS game market for FY 2013.

Battlefield 3™ Premium generated over $120 million in revenue through the March quarter with SimCity™ selling over 1.6 million units since launching in March. Approximately 50% of these sales were in the form of digital downloads.

FIFA 13 sold over 14.5 million units in FY 2013, approximately a 30% increase versus FIFA 12 in the prior year. Digital net revenue for the hit topped $200 million in FY 2013, a 94% increase versus FIFA 12 in the prior year. Total FIFA digital net revenue generated nearly $350 million in FY 2013.

EA’s games and services for mobile and handheld digital revenue generated $104 million in the quarter, a 21%  year-over-year increase in digital net revenues.

Combined, digital net revenues for FY 2013 were up 36% to $1.7 Billion.

Yesterday, EA  announced they will develop and publish new Star Wars titles across the most popular gaming genres and platforms.

Executive Chairman Larry Probst commented “As we enter a new fiscal year, EA is well-positioned for dynamic growth on next generation consoles, PCs, and mobile platforms,” with world-class games, a rapidly growing digital business, and top-notch creative talent, we are excited about EA’s strategy for FY 2014 and beyond.”

“EA has a solid operating plan with disciplined R&D spending and a sharp focus on delivering the best games and services,” said Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen. “We are holding our FY 2014 operating expenses flat to the prior year – a significant achievement in a console transition year.”

“EA and Disney have signed an agreement to create a number of games on the Star Wars franchise,” said EA President of Labels Frank Gibeau. “Our agreement unlocks a whole new future of Star Wars games that will span consoles, PCs, tablets, mobile, and more.”

Source: EA Press Room

Under the agreement, EA will develop and publish new Star Wars titles for a core gaming audience, spanning all interactive platforms and the most popular game genres. Disney will retain certain rights to develop new titles within the mobile, social, tablet and online game categories.

Lucas Arts and Lucas Film were acquired by Disney in October 2012, with the former closed down just last month.

John Pleasants, Co-President of Disney Interactive commented “This agreement demonstrates our commitment to creating quality game experiences that drive the popularity of the Star Wars franchise for years to come. Collaborating with one of the world’s premier game developers will allow us to bring an amazing portfolio of new Star Wars titles to our fans around the world.”

“Every developer dreams of creating games for the Star Wars universe,” said EA Labels President Frank Gibeau. “Three of our top studios will fulfill that dream, crafting epic adventures for Star Wars fans. DICE and Visceral will produce new games, joining the BioWare team which continues to develop for the Star Wars franchise. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.”

The games will all be developed on EA DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine, which is also the technology behind the upcoming Battlefield 4. BioWare, which developed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, is continuing development on the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, which was released in December 2011.

The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Source: EA

The gaming research firm which focus on South East Asia,  has released its latest report on the Chinese online gaming market.

According to Niko, the Chinese PC online gaming market has grown from $10 million in 2001 to more than $9 billion at the end of 2012. The market is expected to grow by $2billion a year in the next five years.

Additionally, the report found that shooters and free-to-play hardcore games such as League of Legends have recently increased in popularity.

Total revenue from “payments and other fees” — which includes game payments — totaled $213 million.

Facebook CFO David Ebersman commented, “We’re pleased that Q1 represented our largest three months quarter of games revenue to date despite a 37 percent drop in year over year payments volume from our largest developer, as our other developers increased their payments volumes by almost 60 percent and we saw a record number of people playing games on Facebook.”

These positive figures come at a time when Facebook’s largest developer, Zynga, are reporting a fall in Monthly Active Users, disappointing profits and game closures. The announcement also follows EA’s decision to pull 7 of their Facebook titles by June of this year.

Overall, revenue for the quarter was up 38 percent to $1.46 billion. Profits were up 7 percent to $219 million. Daily active users were 665 million on average for March, up 26 percent with Monthly active users up 23 percent to 1.11 billion. Mobile MAUs were 751 million, up 54 percent.

For an overview of the top performing Facebook games and publishers click here

The report was conducted through an online survey and completed by 8,867 individuals aged 2 and older.

The report also found that gamers are spending more time gaming, with time spent per week on games up by 9% and on online games up by 6%.

NPD Group analyst Liam Callahan in a statement ”Besides the size of the gaming audience and sales performance, one of the key metrics for the industry to watch is the time gamers spend playing games. This study found that the overall amount of time spent gaming, and time spent gaming online increased across virtually every type of device, and notably so, versus 2012.”

The PC remains king of online gaming, with 68% of online gamers using this this platform. Online gaming on a mobile device has increased by 12% since last year.