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They say one person’s trash is another’s treasure.  Case in point: Robert Ludlum licensing rights.  Not that it is fitting to call the gaming rights for the book catalog of a bestselling author trash, far from it, but when Activision Blizzard decided to cast the rights off, rival Electronic Arts was all too happy to pick them up instead.

EA announced today that they’ve reached a multi-year exclusive license for all of Ludlum’s written works, including the Jason Bourne series.

Vivendi Games previously held the rights.  Activision Blizzard, the company that resulted from the merger of Vivendi Games and Activision, decided to orphan its license in July.

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Nintendo released its third quarter earnings this week (PDF).  Unit sales over the holiday period were great but having to convert overseas purchases from foreign currency to Yen wasn’t.   Profits took a hit.  It was all largely as expected.   Same as the last quarter, mostly. There was one surprise.   Unexpectedly, the company made a million unit downward revision on Wii unit sales projections for the full fiscal year and other adjustments to software expectations (DS Hardware was revised upwards). 

The downward revision on the Wii ?  ….rewind…Holiday sales were record setting.  Just a few months ago, in October,  the company had upped sales projections for the year ending in March by a million units to 27.5m Wii units.   In August they’d increased forecasts as well. The growth was sufficient enough that it prompted the company’s president, Satoru Iwata to say in October it was “safe to say strong game demand is intact despite all the talk about the financial crisis.”

Now carving back the guidance to the prior number of 26.5 million units, even though a relatively small adjustment, begs the question of why.     

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The video game industry isn’t recession proof.  Weaker than expected results in August and September confirmed that.  Comments from NPD’s Michael Klotch at a game summit at SMU’s law school validated it further yesterday.  But, with the official 2008, and December, results now tallied – there’s plenty for companies to be happy with.  Growth hasn’t stopped, it’s simply slowed. It’s more measured,  but monthly, and annually, the results are still trending positively for the industry (even as some individual companies struggle). One out four dollars spent on entertainment in the U.S. goes to gaming, NPD’s Klotch says.

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Despite sickness in the economy and with individual companies in the sector like EA and Midway (more here), the broader video game industry’s retail heartbeat is pulsing strong and steady. For the second month in a row, NPD Group’s retail survey shows above average health.

Year over year, total sales for November were up 10% to $2.91b.  Hardware and software categories saw near equal growth with software up 11% and hardware up 10%.

The sales results were easily good enough to best analyst projections predicting sales gains in the range of 5% to 7%.  Impressively, if adjusted to normalize for the different number of post-Thanksgiving sales days between the two years (Thanksgiving was Nov. 22, in 2007, and Nov. 27 this year), they’d have been even better.

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The November NPD gaming statistics are due within the week but even without the register receipt detail, it’s clear the economy is having an impact on the industry.  While some companies are thriving, others are falling apart.

Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata recently told Reuters that Wii sales more than doubled over the Thanksgiving holiday to nearly 800k units.  Microsoft similarly reported a positive initial surge.  Xbox sales were up 25% the Black Friday weekend.

Closer to the other pole, fortunes (or shoppers) aren’t being as kind to Electronic Arts.   In light of weaker than expected sales, EA announced today that they are lowering their fiscal year 2009 guidance for both earnings per share and net revenue. (The year ends in March).

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In the U.S. NBC Universal and News Corp’s joint video on demand service, Hulu, has proven to be a big success, drawing both audience (Quantcast data) and advertisers.  In the U.K., BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 had hoped to follow a similar path with their own web service, Project Kangaroo (also known as UKVOD).  Their route now looks complicated, if not potentially impassable.

Wednesday, after a prolonged review, the U.K antitrust authority, the Competition Commission (“CC”) issued a provisional finding that the joint venture would unfairly restrict competition. Specifically, the CC believes, as currently defined, Project Kangaroo will lessen essential competition in the supply of UK TV Video on Demand programming.

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THQ is trimming staff and focusing on a smaller slate of titles.  EA announced layoffs too and forecast caution.   Activision showed results that were stellar.  Sony got crushed with currency issues.  Nintendo raised sales expectations for the Wii.   Depending on where you looked, this earnings season was filled with mixed messages from gaming companies. These, stacked on top of stalling retail foot traffic and surprisingly weak retail sales data in August and September, have made it very difficult to gauge the health of the gaming industry heading into the pivotal holiday shopping season. 

Is the industry recession resistant?  Are negative results merely the result of delayed purchases, or single company management choices?  Or is the industry feeling the weight of the greater economy?  It’s been so tough to tell.

Today, NPD Group released their U.S. sales data for October.  The new information adds some much needed additional perspective.

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