Beatles Limited Edition Will Sell Out by November, says Viacom CEO

Anyone waiting to buy his boomer parents a showpiece gift for Christmas, listen up: The CEO of Viacom, parent company of MTV Games, says that the limited edition hardware bundle of Beatles: Rock Band should sell out by November.

That’s the $249 version, with Ringo Starr’s drums and Paul McCartney’s bass (plus microphone and stand). GamesIndustry.biz reports that Phillipe Dauman, the Viacom boss, told a conference yesterday that sales have exceeded internal expectations, to the tune of 25 percent of its inventory being sold in the first week.

“The special limited edition hardware sets that we have are selling really fast,” Dauman told the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XVIII Conference in New York, “and it looks to us that we’ll be selling out of that in November.”

Dauman added that the game’s sales have been, in particular, helped by the price cut on the PlayStation 3.

Should Dauman be right, it will be interesting to see if a bona fide holiday gray market can develop for the Beatles’ top-shelf bundle, considering the expectations of a poor holiday spending season overall, and the fact it’s not a console, just a very expensive version of a single game.

The Beatles Rock Band Sales “Exceeding Expectations” [GamesIndustry.biz]