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.

Comments

Re:Troubling for Sony

[Itchyeyes]

No, I considered it. These numbers are US and Canada only, so the comparison is perfectly apt. NPD does not monitor oversees sales figures. In Japan, the numbers are actually worse for Sony. I think this article sums up the situation well. As for Europe, the fact that they haven't released yet there is a bad thing, not an excuse. It would be better for the PS3 to be selling poorly in Europe at this point rather than not selling at all.

Re:A story in itself...

[AKAImBatman]

There are about 20-30 games out of the gigantic Playstation library of games, some 8000-9000, that don't function properly on the PS3.

Correction: There are 20-30 games (see sibling who disputes this figure) that don't function on the PS3. During the month of January, there was a far higher number of games (easily over 50%) that didn't function properly. To be specific, the PS2 emulation wasn't providing the full graphical quality of the PS2. As a result, the games were looking outright terrible when played on a PS3.

Sony recently fixed this problem with the release of the 1.5 patchset for the PS3.

Re:Troubling for Sony

[king-manic]

Actually it's pretty easy to imagine. If they wanted superior graphics, FF would never have been on a Sony Platform. There were more powerful systems competing with both the PS1, and the PS2.

They also had a high profile falling out with nintendo too. They have since reconciled.

Using your bad math, Sony still loses

[not-enough-info]

About 300k PS2s and 244k PS3s - just wow. That's almost 550k consoles Sony sold in January alone. Man, last place never looked so good!

Nintendo
        Wii - 436K
        DS - 239K
        GBA - 179K
        GC - 34K
total: 888K consoles.
Oops, I forgot ridiculous rounding... OMGz! Nintendo sold about 1 Million consoles!

Sony
        PS3 - 244K
        PS2 - 299K
        PSP - 211K
total: 754K consoles. Did I even need to mention the GameCube?

And, use some common sense and these numbers look insane:

Sony is losing money for every PS3 sold based on manufacturing costs alone, never mind all those units sitting on store shelves. Sony won't even see respite from the bleeding until the 65nm process-shink slated for late this year.
Nintendo makes a profit on every console they sell.

Sony Australia tries "Sweeteners" to soften blow

[Guzzitza]

The PR campaign is gearing up here in Aus for the launch, theres an article in todays paper trying to tell me how Sony is giving us Aussies special treatment by giving us a free Bond DVD and free download of GT:HD (both things that as far as I was aware were available to all regions)

FTA: The launch of Sony's PlayStation 3 next month will be accompanied by a host of freebies that Sony hopes will take the sting out of the game console's $999 price tag. The James Bond film Casino Royale will be offered free to the first 20,000 buyers who register their PS3 online. Additionally the game Gran Turismo: HD will be available to all PS3 buyers as a free download from the PlayStation Network.

Article: http://www.smh.com.au/news/games/sony-unveils-play station-sweetners/2007/02/22/1171733923601.html