August Was Another Great Month For Wii And Gaming

By Max Brenn
00:23, September 15th 2007

The NPD Group released its monthly overview of the gaming market and it’s time to see who did what in the gaming market during the last month.

According to the NPD results August was an impressive month in terms of software sales which were up 22% to $488 million.

Generally speaking it seems that August was a great month for gaming as the combined sales game hardware and software sales were up to $993 million from $669 million in August 2006. In fact this impressive trend was generated by the game hardware sales, which totaled $384 million compared to just $198 million.

But let’s see how the three next-gen gaming console managed to get through August. The little console that could, Nintendo Wii, has achieved again the first place in terms of sales with 403,600 units. This mean that until now Nintendo sold only in US 4.0 million consoles.

Still, July remains the bet month for Wii until now, as during this month the company scored an all time high with 425,000 units sold. The company managed also to sell 383,300 Nintendo DSs.

Thanks to the price cut announced in August Microsoft boosted the sales of its gaming platform with 100,000 units. The Redmond company sold 276,700 compared to only 170,000 units in July. Another factor that boosted Xbox 360 sales were the two titles released in August Madden NFL 08 and BioShock, which were also in the top three best-selling games with 896,600 and respectively 490,900 units.

For Sony August meant just another disastrous month. After in July we saw a revival of the PS3 console due to the price cut in August sold only 130,600 units. In July Sony sold 159,000 units.

The PSP's sales also declined from 214,000 to 151,200, presumably ahead of the PSP Slim's launch, but ht PlayStation 2 proved to be a strong competitor with 202,000.

After this month PlayStation 2 has a installed base of 39.1 million in US only. Also Madden NFL 08 PlayStation 2 version gained the second place in top three games with 643,600 units sold.

As NPD revealed the rest of top 10 games in August were Madden NFL 08 (PlayStation 3) - Electronic Arts - 336,200, Wii Play (Wii) - Nintendo - 256,800, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii) - Nintendo - 218,100, Mario Strikers: Charged (Wii) - Nintendo - 147,400, Guitar Hero 2 Bundle (PlayStation 2) - Activision - 145,400,Mario Party 8 (Wii) - Nintendo - 138,300, Guitar Hero Encore (PlayStation 2) - Activision - 127,100.