Research group NPD has released their official sales figures for console games and hardware in the USA for the month of March.
Hardware sales
1. Wii – 601,000 units
2. Nintendo DS – 563,000 units
3. Xbox 360 – 330,000 units
4. PlayStation 3 – 218,000 units
5. PSP – 168,000 units
6. PlayStation 2 – 112,000 units
While Sony’s PS3 fares better in Europe and Japan, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 continues to outsell it by a fair margin in the USA. This can largely be attributed to the Xbox 360’s lower retail price, as well as its generally superior brand popularity in the States.
Of course the Nintendo Wii remains unbeatable, almost tripling the PS3’s sales figures for the month and once again proving that appealing to a mainstream audience is the best way to sell hardware.
Amazingly the PS2 managed to sell over 100,000 consoles in March, an impressive feat for a console that has been around for nine years.
Game Sales
1. Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360) – 938,000 units
2. Pokemon Platinum Version (DS) – 805,000 units
3. Halo Wars (Xbox 360) – 639,000 units
4. Resident Evil 5 (PS3) – 585,000 units
5. Wii Fit (Wii) – 541,000 units
6. MLB 09: The Show (PS3) – 305,000 units
7. Killzone 2 (PS3) – 296,000 units
8. Wii Play (Wii) – 281,000 units
9. Mario Kart Wii (Wii) – 278,000 units
10. Major League Baseball 2K9 (Visual Concepts, 360) – 205,000 units
In terms of game sales, March was a very good month for Microsoft, who managed to snatch the top spot with Resident Evil 5, as well as secure third place with Halo Wars. All was not lost for Sony however, who managed to secure three spots in the top ten. Killzone 2 saw fairly disappointing sales figures in March, considering that it was launched on Feb 27. It did however manage to sell around 300,000 copies in its first 3 days, which did not reflect in the March sales charts.
Interestingly, although the Nintendo Wii has to date sold around 5 million more consoles than Microsoft, and around 14 million more consoles than Sony in the USA, the higher echelons of the sales charts were dominated by Xbox 360 and PS3 sales, perhaps proving that targeting the more casual audience is not the best way to sell games.
Many analysts claim that the casual market is more profitable than the core gamer market, and that this is where the future of the games industry lies. However, the core gamer market (PS3 and Xbox 360) vastly outsold the casual market, at least as far as we can tell from looking at the top ten.
In fact, if we look at the top ten, Sony and Microsoft combined manage to sell 2,968,000 games. The casual market, dominated by Nintendo only managed 1,905,000 games. This means that while Nintendo managed to sell 616,000 more gaming devices than the Xbox 360 and PS3 combined, the core gaming market bought 1,060,000 more games than the casual market did (in the top ten), and we all know that console manufacturers make their profits by selling games and not hardware.
Disclaimer
The information published here is in no way meant to indicate that one console is better than another, as we do not believe that sales figures are intrinsically linked to the quality of a product.
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