Strong Initial uDraw Gaming Tablet Sales Reported By THQ’s CFO

THQ was “very pleased” with initial sales of its uDraw Gaming Tablet peripheral for the Wii, Chief Financial Officer Paul Pucino told a UBS conference in New York on Wednesday. After strong results over the Black Friday weekend, “our sales have not been tapering off,” which he said was “most compelling for us” because it’s “typical” to see strong sales over the holiday weekend and then a tapering off.

The peripheral shipped Nov. 14 in North America and “continues to sell well” at retailers including Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart, Pucino said. The device has also “been in the top 10 list of Amazon for most of the shopping season,” he said. He didn’t specify how many uDraws had been sold to consumers.

The company is, however, “supply constrained” on the device, Pucino said. THQ initially projected that it would sell 1 million units through the end of its fiscal year in March (CED Sept 17 p9). It later boosted that forecast after projecting it would be able to get about another 300,000 units manufactured this fiscal year (CED Nov 5 p4).

"The demand is strong enough that we would like to get more” units shipped to North American retailers, but THQ wasn’t sure if it could achieve that, Pucino said. THQ doesn’t plan to ship the peripheral in Europe and Asia Pacific until Q4 ending March 31.

Pucino didn’t say what the attach rate was for uDraw software and hardware, nor had THQ said what it expected the attach rate to be. “This is new to us to have hardware out in the market,” he said.

The CFO also provided no sales data for the initial two games for the peripheral that THQ is fielding this holiday season, Pictionary and Dood’s Big Adventure. They're selling for $29.99 each -- significantly less than the cost of most new AAA console games from THQ. “We're probably going to bring somewhere in the area of four to five new titles to the market next fiscal year” for the device, he said. The only other game THQ had announced is coming for uDraw is a SpongeBob SquarePants title that will ship next year, he said.

THQ also remains “very excited” about the Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move for PS3 motion-sensing control systems, also recently launched, Pucino said. Kinect and Move will “broaden the addressable market” for videogames and “broaden the number of gamers that will be attracted to those platforms,” he said.