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Game Consoles Sell Over 3.2 Million Units in November
Ground Glass writes "While there wasn't any question that November was going to be a huge month for gaming (what with those two consoles coming out and all), it's still impressive to see the numbers. In short, Nintendo's DS was the big winner with over 600,000 units sold, though the Wii and Xbox 360 also each broke half a million. The PS3 probably came in at around 200K all told for the month. Convert those numbers into dollars and you're looking at one very fat and happy industry." From the Next Generation article: "In its monthly report analyst Arcadia Investment says console sales in November topped 3.2 million units. Arcadia says hardware sales increased by at least 50% year on year, with software up about 20%. Retail dollars increased by about 25-30% to about $1.6 billion, compared to $1.3 billion in November 2005. "
A long time ago (probably a few years ago anyways) I was talking to someone in marketing about how most car comercials were awful and didn't make me want to spend $25,000+ and her reply was "Most comercials are not about attracting customers but are actually about making existing customers secure in their decision"
The fact is that there are so many PS3 comercials because Sony wants to make the fanboys think that the $600 they spent makes them own a cool product.
I don't think Nintendo ever claimed that there was going to be 1,000,000 systems on launch day; I think there were a lot of rumors and speculation that if Nintendo was trying for 2,000,000 by January 1st that 1,000,000 of those would apear on the first day.
From what I understand Nintendo Shipped about 400,000 to 500,000 on day one with 200,000 to 250,000 every week following that; I have also heard that NPD's sales numbers for november end on November 26th so it is possible that they're missing 4 days of sales (and potentially 1 shipment), I don't know if this is true. All I know is that I have a friend who has been keeping touch with several retailers and is going back to stores several times a week (after they are supposed to get a shipment) but being that he can't get there when the store opens he has yet to be able to get a Wii. It seems that Nintendo is supplying a lot of units but can not match demand.
If you convert to dollars that is $2m for Nintendo, $40m loss for Sony, and $5m loss for Microsoft.
GPL Deconstructed
Perhaps you'll want to visit the site http://nexgenwars.com/ to get a daily update on console sales.
Why should the high volumes of the PS2 scare Sony? It's exactly what happened with the PS1 when the PS2 came out. Sony overlaps their consoles in order to compensate for the fact that they initially take a loss on new ones. The PS2 has a good year in it making Sony money while the PS3 ramps up, while the GC and Xbox are quite dead by now (with TP being the GC's last hurrah).
And you say "processing power" as if it doesn't matter. The SNES was just an NES with more processing power. The PS2 was just a PS1 with more processing power, etc. The new consoles have a *lot* more processing power than the previous gen. Clever developers will use this for more immersive environments, more realistic AI, etc. For example, the 360 and PS3 are really the first consoles that have the horsepower to do realistic physics, allowing for more complex gameplay. They're also the first ones to have the horsepower to do truely interactive environments (destructible geometry, etc). As game developers get more comfortable with these new architectures, you're going to see games that you just couldn't do on previous consoles, graphics aside.
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