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Pokemon Leads Game Sales Up 31% in May

Posted by Zonk on from the drowning-in-pikachu dept.

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.

2 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. Pokemon Still Big In High School by CautionaryX · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Pokemon has made a resurgence among my classmates in the last two years. Everyone is playing the new Pokemon Pearl/Diamond, and there's a few 'retro' people like me that still play the original Blue and Silver versions. Sure, it may be a kids game, but when high school seniors are playing and enjoying updated versions of a game, I think we can all agree that Nintendo did something right with this franchise (although the anime series is lacking).

  2. Re:GBA still being bought? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The gap is closer to a thousand, actually. Gamasutra rounded all the numbers to the nearest thousand except for the GBA, which they rounded to the nearest ten thousand for some reason. There were 81,604 PS3s and 80,554 GBAs sold according to the numbers I saw.

    I think licensed games are still being made for the GBA, but I'm not sure if any original stuff still is.