Pokemon Leads Game Sales Up 31% in May

Gamasutra has several coverage elements about last month's NPD figures, which unsurprisingly show Nintendo's continued dominance of console sales numbers. A combined 569,000 units sold for Pokemon Diamond and Pearl probably helped some. "According to official sources and a number of independent reports, total industry sales were up 49 percent to $815 million for the month, with hardware sales up 79 percent to $221 million, and the Nintendo DS selling an impressive 423,000 units for the month. The rest of the hardware sales revealed that the Wii sold an impressive 338,000 units for the month, with the Xbox 360's sales down somewhat at around 155,000 units and the PlayStation 3 sold just 82,000 during May in the U.S. On the handheld side of things, the PSP trailed the DS but still sold around 221,000 units, and the Game Boy Advance sold just 80,000 units for the month. Rounding off the major players, the PlayStation 2 sold 188,000 units during May." Those DS sales are nothing to sneeze at, as an analyst group estimates that by 2011 there will be some 112 Million DS units sold ... with an 89% install base in Japan. The site has a further breakdown of last month's numbers, analyzing the dip in overall console sales and the potentials of each platform. The Curmudgeon Gamer is the mind behind that analysis, and he had two further points to make about the numbers on his site.

Comments

Re:Pokemon: News That Matters...

[Mathonwy]

Yeah, just throwing my hat into the ring as a slashdot reader who plays pokemon, unapologetically.

I started because I write and design games for a living, and figured "if it's still around after all these years, there is probably somthing behind it." (That was back in the ruby/sapphire days.)

I kept playing, because under the cute presentation, is a surprisingly deep game, of the same nature as Magic the Gathering. (The game of "you have a wide library of abilities, and a limited number of slots to put them into; build a deck/monster/whatever. Oh, and the abilities combine in interesting ways.")

Pokemon actually manages to make turn-based RPG-style combat WORK in one-on-one battles. (Which almost always suck in RPGs, since they degenerate into "attack-attack-attack-attack-attack-heal-attack-at tack-attack..." strings.) There is a surprisingly deep game under the cuteness, and you can actually talk about "high level play" in pokemon, and be completely serious.