NPD has released their console sales numbers for the U.S., for August, 2008. The next-gen console sales for the month were:
XBox 360: 195,200
PS3: 185,400
Wii: 453,000
The recent price break has been beneficial to the XBox 360, allowing it to beat the PS3 in America for the first month since April. Nintendo, of course, continues to prove that casual gamers (and even so-called “nongamers”) can actually be a far more profitable group than the “typical gamers” and hardcore gamers that Microsoft and Sony are fighting over.
The above graph shows how well each of the three next-gen systems sold in the U.S. so far in 2008.
Nintendo’s dominance is even more clear in the graph showing it skyrocketing past both other systems in sales this year. With the “struggling economy” (which is the nice way of saying massive clusterf@ck on Wall St) the premium-priced PS3 likely won’t have the breakout Christmas this year they were hoping for. The Xbox 360 will likely struggle as well, as though the lowest-priced model is comparable to the Wii’s pricing, the hard drive-equipped models cost more, as does the online service for those wishing to play against other players online.
Still, the XBox 360 has been out a year longer than the other consoles, so here is a chart that shows the total U.S. sales of the consoles over their lifetimes.
The Wii is now almost 1,000,000 units ahead of the XBox 360 in the United States, despite the year-long head start of Microsoft’s system. The PS3 is trending very close to the XBox 360 in terms of time since release sales, which, if the trend continues, doesn’t bode especially well for the system in the U.S. The PS3 needs to break away more substantially to catch the 360 in Microsoft’s home territory.
As many people have been asking me about worldwide sales numbers, I'll go ahead and provide a screengrab from VGChartz below. While VGChartz' data is certainly interesting to look at, it must be noted that they have a smaller sample of data to work from than the NPD data for the U.S., and that they have to attempt to extrapolate data worldwide. As such, it must be assumed that the data is somewhat less accurate than the NPD data.
Worldwide sales definitely shows an even bigger trend for the Wii's dominance and the slowing sales of the Xbox 360. The PS3 trails the Xbox 360 by only 25% now, despite the Xbox's year-long head start.
While Microsoft continues to act as though the XBox 360 has been a rousing success, the slowing sales of the system, combined with massive hardware failures and a lowered price are doing nothing to bring long-term profitability to the Xbox division, something which Microsoft had promised when they launched the system. At that time, Microsoft made it quite clear to investors that development of any future systems would be contingent on the Xbox division bringing a profit to the company in the current gen.
That leaves Microsoft in a precarious position… most likely, if they didn’t have to answer to investors, they would ditch the 360 and launch a new system next fall – one that is indisputably superior to the competing PS3 and doesn’t rely on a severely flawed design. But the costs of developing the 360 aren’t even close to being recouped, much loess the money the extended warranty has cost the company, so an investor backlash would almost certainly result. This leaves them in an awkward position, with the mass production of Blu-ray OPUs and other components dramatically cutting the production costs of the PS3 to ever-closer to that of the 360. Even at higher (sometime considerably higher) prices, the PS3 has more than held its own this year against Microsoft’s offering, and if Sony decides to take a bigger hit on the system due to the economy, Microsoft could conceivably be forced (by their own investors) out of the gaming market by the end of this generation.
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