James Delahunty
17 Apr 2008 23:38
The NPD figures are out and nobody is surprised that the Nintendo Wii console is far up the ladder from its two competitors again. Microsoft and Sony ended the month only 5,000 unit sales apart, with the Xbox 360 taking the tiny lead. Specifically, the Wii console sold an impressive 721,000 units, followed by the handheld DS console which wasn't too far behind at 698,000 units.
The PlayStation Portable (PSP) sold more units than both the remaining next-generation home console systems, crossing the finish line with 297,000 units. As for the remaining two enemies, the difference was just 5,000 unit sales, with Xbox 360 selling 262,000 and PlayStation 3 (PS3) selling 257,000. The PlayStation 2 (PS2) console managed 216,000 sales. Do the figures sound impressive? They should as it represents a 46% growth in hardware sales over March 2007, to $551.3 million.
If you add Hardware, Software and Accessory sales for the games industry in March, you come out with a total take of $1.7 billion, a rise 57% over March 2007. "You'd never know that the U.S. economy was under distress by looking at the video games industry sales figures," NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in a statement.
Software sales for the month were also much better than expected, amounting to a take of $945.6 million. "The amazing year-over-year increase in software sales isn't just explained by a few top games," Frazier said. "As compared to last March, twice as many SKU's achieved sales in excess of 100K units this month."
Super Smash Bros. Brawl topped the charts easily by moving 2.7 million copies, followed by Ubisoft's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 with 752,000 copies sold.