The NPD Group has released the hardware and video game sales chart for the month of January for the United States market, but the company no longer offers actual sales numbers for hardware, so analyst Michael Pachter stepped into the breach in order to offer a clearer picture of sales during last month.
The Wesbush Morgan analyst has said that Nintendo managed to sell 319,000 Wii home consoles during the month, while the PlayStation 3 managed sales of 267,000 during the same time period.
For the Wii the decline was pretty significant, down 31 percent over the same month of 2010 while the Sony platform went down by about 3%.
Sony released a statement highlighting the wide number of titles available for its main home console and claiming that the platforms had “momentum” coming into 2011.
Microsoft was very happy to
talk about the Xbox 360, which topped the hardware sales chart, managing to move 381,000 units to gamers and be the only platform that grew during January 2011.
Pachter also says that the Nintendo DS handheld has managed to sell 350,000 devices during the month, while the PlayStation Portable came in with sales of 80,000.
The NPD Group says that overall the industry lost 5 percent from the overall value of its sales during the month of January, with hardware performing worse that software.
The continuing decline in sales for the Wii means that Nintendo must be thinking about creating a replacement for the home console, designed specifically to offer motion tracking and ease of use while also delivering improved computing power and more storage space for games.
The leader of publisher THQ has said that he does not expect a new console to arrive in the near future from Microsoft and
Nintendo but left the door open for an announcement from Nintendo.
The company might offer more information after the late February and March launch of the 3DS handheld.
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