Spin Cycle: Microsoft Points to Xbox 360 Growth

Each major console manufacturer is “pleased” after the monthly NPD Group numbers, which track sales on the all important North American market, are announced.

The problem is that some of them have a reason to be pleased (like the dominating Nintendo) while others (think Sony) cherry pick positive facts from the NPD report. Microsoft is always somewhere in the middle, lagging behind Nintendo in overall sales but regularly outselling the PlayStation 3 by a factor of 1.5 to 1.

There are two things that Microsoft is eager to point out regarding the sales of March. Overall, the videogames industry has seen sales fall by 17%, mostly because of the world wide recession and because of the fact that there were no huge software releases during the month. Still, the Xbox 360 managed to sell around 330,000 units, which is an increase of almost a quarter over the same month in 2008. It's a bright spot for Microsoft in a month when even Nintendo saw year over year sales decline.

The second aspect that Microsoft pushes in its press releases is the fact that four of the top videogames of March were launched for the platform. Resident Evil 5 for the Xbox 360 was the best sold game of the month, while Halo Wars, a real time strategy exclusive to the platform, took second place, managing to displace the ever green Wii Fit. The PlayStation 3 countered with its version of Resident Evil 5, but it only reached the third position in the videogame chart.

Microsoft is also showing off the stats related to its Xbox Live service, which has seen the number of users who buy content double. The increase has been largely driven by the exclusive downloadable content that arrived on the service, like the Lost & Damned add-on for Grand Theft Auto IV or The Pitt content for Fallout 3.