Slashdot Mirror
January Game Sales Explode, Wii Dominates
njkid1, as he does from time to time, passed us a link to a story on the GameDaily site. Today they're discussing the January NPD numbers for the games industry. In short, they're terrific. Software sales totaled $549 million for the month, up a staggering 53 percent over last year. Hardware sales were brisk as well, with the Wii selling around 436,000 units. Trailing behind were Microsoft and Sony, with 360 hitting 294,000 units sold and the PS3 selling 244,000 units. January had an extra week, which resulted in 'inflated' sales, but even after normalizing the data things were tremendous for the games industry in a month where there's normally a post-holiday slump.
"Another hidden story, from the article:
"And the PS2 also continues to outperform the PS3; Sony's six-year-old system sold 299K units.""
Woah! You aren't too bright are you? Every single console developer is seeing that Sony just sold 300k units of their seven year old console and 244k of their brand new console. So all those developers who put their massive support behind Sony seven years ago with the PS2 still have a vibrant and hugely expanding market that a year and a half after a new generation console has gone on sale it continues easily outsell.
And on top of that Sony has put the hard work into making sure that all those developers out there who have are still putting out games for the gigantic - 105-110 million - PS2 market will all run flawlessly on the PS3. Right now for PS2 developers Sony just put almost 600k new systems out there that can run your software.
Is the little light bulb going off over your head and grasping why Sony has the largest developer support by a huge margin and that even PC game developers(even though they clearly for the most part arne't up to the task, -cough- Carmack -cough-) are now scrambling to get their games on Sony's platform?
I'll go through it again more slowly if you still aren't up to speed.
Oblivion? Tell me you're kidding.
"Sufferin' succotash."