HomeIn the excitement over the end of the HD format war, I had almost forgotten about the January 2008 NPD game console sales figures for the US. As expected, sales dropped quite a bit after the Holiday sales, but were still quite respectable. You can read last month’s analysis here. The figures are from NPD, a marketing research firm that releases games console sale data every month.
The figures for US sales in January are below, ranked in order of number of sales:
There’s a bit of a controversy over this month’s figures. Microsoft has claimed that stock shortages, due to January stock being sold in December to cover the unexpected strong demand, has severely affected sales figures in the month. Nintendo has claimed the same reason for the low Wii sales numbers. This confirms my personal experience during December here in Australia, where most stores had no stock for Xbox 360 and Wii’s, while the only game console on sale was the PS3. Sony’s PS3 did not suffer from similar stock problems, and with the positive vibes coming from Warner’s decision to support Blu-ray exclusively, the PS3 recorded the first ever monthly victory over the Xbox 360. But as mentioned before, these numbers should be treated with some suspicion. And as such, I will limit my analysis for this month, which is also due to the low figures being reported as compared to last month.
Probably more indicative of the actual market was software sales. It was another strong month for the Xbox 360, with 5 titles in the top 14, including the coveted number one spot (once again taken by the excellent Call of Duty 4). The Wii also had 4 top selling software in the same list, while the PS3 had two (one of them is, you guessed it, Call of Duty 4). The Xbox 360 therefore accounted for 40% of the top 14 selling software, Wii at 33% and the PS3 at 10%. If you look at the total console sales figure graph above, the ratios do look similar.
Next month, hopefully, will see some figures that aren’t possibly affected by stock shortages. See you then.
