Console sales boom in 12/2006
As expected, numbers of sold next-gen consoles during the Holiday season skyrocketed and gave the manufacturers a good reason to celebrate. But there’s one paradox: Sony’s Playstation 2 – an old timer compared to the Xbox 360, Wii and Playstation 3 – outsold all of the competition. Supply glitches affecting the newest consoles and the PS2’s lower price point were likely contributing factors. Overall, the industry sold US$3.7 billion of hardware, software and accessories in the United States last month, up from $2.9 billion a year earlier. For the full year, sales were $12.5 billion, the industry’s highest returns ever, according to widely watched figures released Thursday by NPD Group, a market research firm.
Americans bought 1.4 million PlayStation 2s during the period. That was more than the Xbox 360, which sold 1.1 million units; the Nintendo Wii, which sold 604,000; and the PlayStation 3, which sold 491,000. For Japan, Enterbrain, a game magazine publisher, released sales estimates this past week that showed Sony had fallen far short of its goal of selling a million PlayStation 3s there last year. Sony sold 534,336 of the consoles from their debut in Japan on Nov. 11 through last Sunday, Enterbrain said. By contrast, the Tokyo-based publisher reported that Nintendo had sold 1.14 million units of the Wii by the same date, even though the Wii went on sale three weeks after the PlayStation 3.
For Sony and Nintendo, the real trouble was not demand but supply, Janco said. “It probably means that Nintendo missed its goal” of shipping 4 million Wiis worldwide by the end of the year, he said. Some of the PlayStation 2’s success can be attributed to the manufacturers’ inability to make and ship enough of the PlayStation 3 and Wii consoles, which analysts said were gobbled up as quickly as they appeared on shelves. Finally, the most sold video game for December was action “Gears of War,” which was spreaded in 816 thousand legal copies.
Source: Cnet, Inquirer, NYTimes
Comments(5)
sorry but I was never interested in consoles
pc ole pc forever
Well I stand for the very same opinion, but consoles are seriously overtaking this world, if we talk about gaming. The only reason for staying with PC is multiplayer, I played like 2 singleplayer games in the last year…
im not a gamer at all so thats why i never wanted a console
on the pc i just play Need for Speed and Grand Theft Auto
I play them till I finish them and thats it.
Thanks God, NFS Carbon worked fine on this pc (I have 4 years)
next year it will be time for a new machine
This is mainly the main reason to get a console: you dont have to update your console for a new game =)
Nice BOOM piece of news indeed ^^
or at least that used to be the way, look at the PSP you have to update your firmware just to play some of the newer games. I know you probably meant hardware wise but it’s still a pain.
Personally i have my PC for FPS gaming in general and a Wii and DS Lite for fun and travelling. Wii offers a completly different style of games to what my PC does and i don’t have a good enough laptop to play my PC games on the move(most of which i would need the net for anyway) so i have a DS.
Sony seemed to have taken for granted that the PS3 would sell really well in Japan and so focused a lot on the US, only in Japan the PS3 has sold half what sony predicted which is terrible for a newly released console.
Personally i think this is due to the PS3 basically offering what the the 360 offers only at a higher price and with a fancy drive, the thing is look at how badly the Xbox in general does in Japan. I think it was outsold by pretty much everything most months.
I think the PS3 will sell very well in the US as shown by current figures but if they lose much of the japanese audience they will be in trouble. As for the PAL region they have already turned a lot of people at Christmas to get a 360, if they don’t meet the march release date i expect they can kiss good bye to most of Europe.