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.
