NHL 13 Sales Up Despite (or Because of) Lockout

As some of you may know, it’s gone dark on the NHL here in North America since the league and the players’ association can’t come to a contract agreement, resulting in lockout. Whether or not an agreement will be reached and the players will come back to the ice remains to be seen, but there’s one place where there’ll never be a lockout: your video game console.

EA Sports published a press release the other day to announce that NHL 13 has snagged series-high sales. The game moved 484,000 units, an improvement of 9 percent over last year’s first week of sales for NHL 12.

The sales spike could be due to a couple different factors. It could be the solid scores the game’s been earning from reviewers. This is also the second year in a row without any competition from EA Sports’ biggest rival in the market, 2K Games’ NHL 2K franchise, which called it quits in 2011. The fact that this is the only place that hockey fans can get their fix is also a likely contributor to the jump in the numbers.

Which, of course, leads to the obvious question: would people watch simulated hockey games via NHL 13? What if the lockout lasted for the rest of the season? In order to give fans what they want, would they be happy simply watching a simulated season created via the video game?

I say yes. If for no other reason than it’d be totally insane.