The never-ending battle between the game consoles makers
brings out the best from the companies involved, with the top three market
leaders taking turns at the number one spot.
Monitoring the ups and downs is a well-known consumer
product research group called the NPD Group, which releases from time to time
the best sellers and also figures recorded by the company. NPD announced that
for the past several months Nintendo has been holding on strong to the first
sales position, dominating all the other companies across the United States. One
of its main attributes is the fact that it put out two popular products at the
same time: the Nintendo DS and also Wii. This month the trend stayed the same,
with Nintendo selling 518,000 DSs and 453,000 Wii consoles.
"Across hardware, software and accessories, products
for the Wii platform contributed 28% of total industry dollar sales for the
month of August," explained NPD analyst Anita Frazier about Nintendo’s
significantly large console sales. Nintendo managed to sell 12 million Wiis and
22 million DS units this season.
A very distant second is the PlayStation 3, topped in sales
by Nintendo with more than 330,000 units.
"Despite smaller growth this month, the industry is up
32 percent year-to-date and remains on target to achieve annual revenues in the
range of $22 to $24 billion," added Anita Frazier, referring to the
industry’s first single-digit growth overall in the past 27 months.
She also talked about the games released this year "Madden NFL 09 was the top-selling
game of the month, and launched with 2.3 million units out of retail doors in
its first month, besting last year's (Madden
NFL 08) title by 2%," said Ms. Frazier. "Year after year, the
industry can count on the Madden
release to bring folks into stores during the relatively lazy days of late
summer."
The bestselling football game, even if it is in its 20th
year, managed to get a hold of the top three slots among the month's top
sellers. Microsoft Xbox 360’s version was the No. 1 game, with a total of 1 million
copies, followed by the Sony PlayStation 3 version with a total of 643,000
copies and the PS2 version with 425,400 units. The Nintendo Wii version did not
do as well, selling only 115,800 which placed it at number 9 on NPD's monthly
chart.
Nintendo is setting up its campaign for the upcoming holiday
season, looking to keep the current sales trend and even take it further. One
of the main focuses is to make sure that stores will not encounter any sort of
shortages this Christmas, whether is a console or a certain game. "We are
hard at work like Santa's elves making sure that consumers who go into retail
this holiday season are able to find what they are looking for," says
Denise Kaigler, vice president of corporate affairs for Nintendo of America.
According to the NPD, U.S. sales of video game hardware,
software, and accessories totaled $1.08 billion in August, with software sales
up 13 percent and hardware sales up by 3 percent.
