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

[trdrstv]

Well yeah, because all the consoles in the past have been designed to put out images on an SD television set. Now that there are 2 consoles out there with HD as their focus, the state-of-the-art in terms of graphics is HD resolutions. For a series that has sold out to the eye candy, its pretty hard to imagine them passing up two systems with superior graphical power for the Wii.

The PS2 had a handfull of 720p games and 1 1080i game (GT4) so if they were about pushing the boundries... why didn't they? Others proved higher resolutions were possible. Hell 480p from 480i should have been dirt simple to do by comparison.

its pretty hard to imagine them passing up two systems with superior graphical power for the Wii.

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.

Square went where the market was. The same logic that got them on the Sony boat to begin with; was the same logic used to move the Dragon Quest Series off the PS2 and onto the DS. It is the same logic that can be used to move FF to the Wii. They aren't about pushing graphical boundries, they are about pushing units of software.

Re:Troubling for Sony

[nanoDaveF]

I agree completely. The only reason I bought my wii is that I thought it would be much more fun to play than the other consoles. Even my wife loves it and she hates video games. Nintendo has hit a home run and they know it. The data is proving it. Soon, all of the companies that weren't 'bothering' with porting their games to Nintendo consoles will be concentrating on them. The innovation that Nintendo is introducing will expand the bounderies of games as more and more game companies put their ingenuity to work. If you have to pick between games that are more fun or more pretty, more fun wins most of the time. Pretty is cool, but it gets old. Fun never does.