14 DAY TRIAL // The NPD Group figures for the month of May were revealed yesterday, with the Best selling home console being the Xbox 360 from Microsoft yet again, while L.A. Noire managed to be the best seller when it comes to video game sales.
And now analyst Michael Pachter, who is watching the video game industry for Wedbush Morgan Securities, has revealed that the Nintendo Wii home console, which has been slowing down in terms of sales for some time, has managed to move 236,000 units, which is well above the level of the PlayStation 3 and below the Xbox 360, which has stood at 270,000 in sales.
The analyst also says that the recently launched Nintendo 3DS handheld has again performed rather poorly, dropping about 50 percent when compared to the month of April, which probably means that it is under the 100,000 sales mark.
The analyst says, “The 3DS again failed to deliver the results we expected, leaving the industry outlook unclear near term. Without further price cuts for PS3 and 360, we expect hardware sales to trend down later in 2011, though we think that Sony and Microsoft may consider cuts around the holidays later this year.”
The 3DS now stands around 700,000 handhelds sold in the United States and has just gone past the 1 million units barrier in Japan, a smaller market for video game.
Pachter recently said he believes that newly unveiled Wii U home console from Nintendo, which includes a new controller with a touch screen and analog controls, is about two years too late and will be unable to make a significant impact on launch.
The Nintendo 3DS was hot property when it launched earlier in the year, mainly because of its innovative three-dimensional capabilities, but since then the device has been hampered by a lack of important launch titles.
Nintendo plans to launch more games for the device before the end of the year.