14 DAY TRIAL // The NPD Group numbers for November are showing that the Xbox 360 from Microsoft has managed to sell more than the PlayStation 3 from Sony in the United States for the first time in the last three months just as the videogames industry registered a 7.6% decline over the same month in 2008.
The biggest hit was to revenue derived from the sale of hardware, which went down by 13.4% to reach 1.05 billion dollars. The main culprit for the decline can be found in the price cuts which Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo operated over the course of this year but the overall economic downturn can also take part of the blame.
The best selling consoles were the ones made by Nintendo. The DS handheld sold 1.7 million units in one month, while the Wii home gaming console felt the effects of its new reduced price and managed to move 1.26 million units to gamers, which is pretty good considering that the Xbox 360 shipped around 820,000 units in the same time frame, while the PlayStation 3 slowed down to only move 710,000 pieces in the respective period. The PlayStation Portable has just succeeded in edging out the PlayStation 2, with 293,900 to 203,100 units.
Anita Frazier, who is one of the analysts working with the NPD Group, commented on the results, “While there has been a lot of focus on Wii sales as compared to last year, the system was still the best-selling console system by a margin of 54 percent. At this same point in the PS2 life cycle, the PS2 was down in unit sales by 23% over the previous year, but as history has shown, it continues to have a great deal of life left in it. So focusing on a comparison to Wii's stellar 2008 performance masks the reality of just how well this system is selling.”