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. "

Comments

DS + Wii vs. PSP + PS3

[seebs]

Remember when Nintendo had a game machine that was low-powered, but had an innovative control scheme many initially derided as gimmicky, and it was in direct competition with a higher-powered, much more expensive, Sony product which could play movies in a new and effectively proprietary format?

Apparently, it wasn't a bad plan.

Re:Ranked in terms of consoles sold last month:

[AuMatar]

The Wii and PS3 are hampered by availability. Although if I were Sony, the high volume of PS2 would scare me- all the PS3 brings to the table is more power. If people are still buying the PS2, then power won't be enough. It puts the Wii in a real spot to win this round, as they aren't counting on the processing power to win.

Channel Stuffing

[Boogaroo]

So it looks like Microsoft is trying to flood the retail stores in an attempt to be able to claim some shipped console number near 10 million. Can't be a smart move since there are going to be piles of 360s sitting around for the next few months and they are going to have to undership next quarter and any little benefit they get from claiming higher shipment numbers now will be offset with the reciprocal low shipment news next quarter.

There's a dirty little trick there that Sony's used before. What you do is recall the overshipment, and then re-ship to places that need it. You get to count those consoles as shipped twice. Nice isn't it?

Re:Ranked in terms of consoles sold last month:

[be-fan]

Bullshit. Dvorak was spouting off in the mid 1990s about how nobody would ever need anything more than a 200 MHz Pentium. It wasn't true then, it's not true now.

The NES to SNES upgrade was actually relatively minor. You got more colors and bigger sprites, but the CPU was still weak, so the games were the same, but prettier. The SNES -> N64 transition was huge. It was the first console that could do 3D properly. Mario 64 changed platformers completely, and would not have been possible on any previous console. FPS as a genre wasn't really feasible until then either. The PS2 was the first console that had the horsepower to have complex environments, because the N64 and PS could not push enough polygons to do more than very simplistic environments.

This generation is potentially as interesting as the N64 one. The new consoles have an order of magnitude more power than the previous gen, and more importantly, they have a lot of power that's independent of the graphics pipeline. Wheras the main CPU in the PS2 spends much of its time crunching geometry to feed the rasterizer, the geometry processor in the RSX frees the Cell in the PS3 from much of that. Wheras previous consoles had to squeeze in AI and physics into a small slice of time between handling graphics code, the current batch can spend a lot of main CPU time on those things.

Gears of War is really a prime example. Even if you toned down the graphics, such a game could not be done on previous-gen systems. They don't have the horsepower to do either the physics, nor the level complexity (battlefields strewn with junk that serves as cover).