This month’s game sales figure are out by NPD and sadly, the start of the holiday season in US doesn’t look good. The figures include the Black Friday sales and despite registering decent overall sales on Black Friday this year, the gaming hardware sales fell by 13.4 percent and software by 3.1 percent.
NPD’s analyst Anita Frazier reckons the sales for this month is so bad that to break even to last year, December sales need to be up by 36 percent from last December.
As far as hardware sales are concerned, Wii again topped the month with a sale of 1.26m units followed by Microsoft Xbox 360 with 820,000 and Sony PS3 with 710,000. However, it is important to note that PS3 is the only console to show YoY growth with an increase of 90 percent while Wii accounted 35 percent less from last year and Xbox 360 by 2 percent.
[Via Reuters]
Growth or not, they are still impressive numbers and traditionally at this stage in consoles lifetimes numbers do drop. There is a point even with an expanded audience this generation, that new customers will become fewer as the main bulk of the target audience has already purchased.
Don’t forget, sales this gen have far outweighed the whole of last gen already.