NPD Results: Nov 2008
PlayStation brand suffers as Nintendo and Microsoft clean up.Published 12/12/2008 at 7:49 by nofi
US Sales Show 360 On Top [21]
NPDs Hit: PS3 In Third Place [13]
Microsoft Respond To Sales Figures [50]
The monthly sales figures are in from America, and it’s not pleasant reading for Sony. Ignoring the ridiculous Wii and DS sales (2 million, really, who the hell doesn’t have a Wii yet?) it’s the Xbox 360 sales that will sting the most, with over twice the number of 360s sold than PS3s. Still, combining the PS3 with the PS2 and PSP will surely give Sony room to spin this in their favour as we await the press releases from the brand holders.
Playstation 2 206k
Playstation 3 378k
PSP 421k
Xbox 360 836k
Wii 2.04M
DS 1.57M
Software sales follow a similar pattern, with poor sales for Resistance 2. Here’s the top ten across all formats:
GEARS OF WAR 2 (360) 1.56 million
CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR (360) 1.41 million
WII PLAY W/ REMOTE (WII) 796K
WII FIT (WII) 697K
MARIO KART (WII) 637K
CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR (PS3) 597K
GUITAR HERO WORLD TOUR (WII) 475K
LEFT 4 DEAD (360) 410K
RESISTANCE 2 (PS3) 385K
WII MUSIC (WII) 297K
Monthly NPD sales results always appear on GAF first.
Comments
Please note that all comments are the opinion of the individual author and not TheSixthAxis.
SteveTheSkorie | 12/12/2008 08:34
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The sony brand didn’t completely suffer.
As a whole, they passed the $1Million mark.
Also, the 360 is priced at half the PS3 and in this economic climate, we can hardly expect non-gaming-educated people to choose the PS3. They see two things that are the same and then they look at the price tag.
nofi | 12/12/2008 08:44
Wants a custom tag.
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“As a whole, they passed the $1Million mark.”
There we go!
mcphatty | 12/12/2008 09:20
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Tis true, good points. And Sony have 3 consoles, its a lot to expect the priciest one to do the best!
andytorr | 12/12/2008 09:22
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Give it time. The day will come, wont it?
wolfehound22 | 12/12/2008 12:48
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As a whole Sony did not do bad. PS3 alone not real good
TctclMvPhase | 12/12/2008 13:12
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Whenever I get down about PS3 sales I just stroll over to Wikipedia’s “Best-Selling Game Consoles”. Points of interest include the PS2 proudly perched atop the list with well over three times the sales of the Wii…and it is still selling over 200k a month. Also note that the PSOne is close behind at the third spot with only the Gameboy/Gameboy Color combo beating it. Finally as of this month the PS3 has outsold the Sega Saturn. The next milestone may be the Gamecube a few million away, but we have yet to see the PS3 price drop that may coincide nicely with the releases of SFIV and Killzone 2. Cheers.
kamiboy | 12/12/2008 16:32
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There was a reason for that, which I discuss in an article I wrote three weeks ago. Why the hell isn’t that up yet by the way? Or any of the other 5 or so articles I’ve submitted since then?
If they are not going to be posted could the powers that be at the TSA towers at least tell me, and give me a reason perhaps?
theshockwave | 12/12/2008 17:48
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Wow tonnes of Trackbacks, thought I’d never reach the reply box…
Anyways, the PS3 isn’t doing horribly just not as good as 360. The massive 360 sales just so happen to be at the same time as the massive GoW and COD sales. Coincidence? I think not.
Fear not lads. All WILL be well. It just will.
cc_star | 12/12/2008 20:31
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Sony sold 378k PS3’s at a loss
MS sold 836k 360’s at a loss
Is the winner really the loser?
djhsecondnature | 13/12/2008 02:08
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An interesting view
kamiboy | 13/12/2008 06:26
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Here is another take, Uncle Billy lost a couple of billion every quarter for about seven years while patiently waiting for their whole shit sandwich system to catch on. Uncle Billy has so many wheelbarrows of money wheeled in to his offices every month that loosing such paltry sums for even decades on end is what loosing a fart feels like to normal people.
SONY has been struggling with their finances since the late 90’s, and they have a board of directors and share holder to answer to who unlike Uncle Billy will not sit around and just accept billions of losses for several years in a row without demanding something to be done. SONY has yet to demonstrate the PS3 to be a profitable part of their business and now they are under pressure from all fronts to cut even heavier losses into themselves with yet another price drop soon. This means SONY is looking at going into a third year of their gaming division posting huge losses while at the same time their sales continue to trail way behind everyone else with no outlook of either changing anytime soon.
Uncle Billy, as I’ve said for about oh, 7 years now, is not interested in making money off of their little gaming venture, not at all. If they make a profit when all is said and done it will just be a pleasant surprise. Their real goal is to chase SONY out of the business by outspending them. They’ve demonstrated that fine enough by continuing to aggressively dropping the price on their system at a time when they know very well that SONY cannot afford to follow suit. It is a strategy old as sin for Uncle Billy, they’ve run many businesses out of town using this tactic in the past.
If SONY does not start posting huge profits in their gaming division by the end of ‘09 then I wouldn’t hold my breath on ever being able to buy a PS4, SONY might just pull a SEGA and become publisher only next generation or just buckle under and be split up and ripped apart.
I started fearing all this happening back in 2001 when I first heard Uncle Billy was biting his lips as he was eying the console industry, my worst case scenarios have all come to pass like so many domino bricks falling in sequence.
Now tell me, who has the most to loose?
colossalblue | 13/12/2008 17:56
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You know what this thread is missing?
Some trackbacks.
xvLIAMvx | 13/12/2008 08:35
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I can’t see it failing. It’s Sony. Yeah they may have made mistakes, yeah gambled with the new tech and the way developers must rethink game development to get the most out of it. Home is brave and new. But this is exactly where the Xbox was last gen. It was new, with HDD as standard, and LIVE was a new brave experience. I don’t consider the Xbox a failure. Rather a base cemented for the workings of the 360 and most importantly, LIVE. At worst – this is the PS3’s destiny. To lay the base for the PS4 and HOME/PSN. As with LIVE to Microsh@ft, HOME is another big revenue for SONY. Cash from members and sponsors (big bucks) will start to flow into Sony pockets. Blu-ray (fingers crossed) will see the next gen, and the Cell will prove to be the best thing since Angelina Jolie boxsets in WHSmith! So at worst, this is a loss based set up for a profit reaping PS4 and Home 2.0. Of course this is entirely my hyped and optimistic opinion, with spelling errors and grammar issues. But I’m and optimist!
kamiboy | 13/12/2008 16:22
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Being brave and new is not enough, you also have to be good and have mass appeal. Home was a strange idea to begin with and its execution is was horrendous.
After almost two years of constant delays they release a “public Beta” that is so ridiculously bare bones that it does not even resemble the GDC 2007 demonstrated version from two year ago. What the fuck were you doing in those two years? Holy fuck SONY!
Home is just a parade of bad ideas by a team who didn’t know what they were doing so they did nothing and everything.
SONY is not poor in new ideas, but they are a hobo when it comes to execution. This is something Uncle Billy has never got wrong. Their execution of everything they did was so many leaps and bounds above SONY that people were willing to buy their machine even when there was a good chance its hardware would fail and die.
The CELL was a nightmare cooked up in a board room meeting, to spend billions of dollars developing such a CPU that drove the cost of the PS3 up, delayed it by a year and gave it absolutely no visible advantage what so ever when it came to games is just sad. When you factor in that the CELL is directly responsible for multiplarform games still more often than not performing worse on the PS3 it goes from sad to depressing.
The PS3’s competitor has no fancy shmancy hardware built into it, it launched a year ahead of the PS3 and yet games often run better on it. So not only were the CELL and Blu-ray quests with no reward, but they are right now responsible for all of SONY’s woes.
The system still costs 300 pounds because of those useless pieces of hardware. I know PS3 developers boast of the extra capacity of Blu-ray and the power of the CELL, but they are all just talking out of their arses, because I look at both sides and see no advantage. In reality they dont make a difference, developers would have easily done without both if the PS3 had a DVD drive and an ordinary PowerPC CPU.
The only thing these two pieces of technology are doing is weighing SONY down. Blu-ray will never replace DVD, you can be sure of that. SONY’s win over HD-DVD was a Phyrric victory, in the end it will mean nothing. Ordinary consumers are not willing to pay more for something they cannot see a discernible difference in.
PS3 exclusive developers will continue making great games on the PS3, but we will never see a game and go, damn son, this can only be done on the PS3. There will always be an equally good looking game on the other side that people can point to.
In other words SONY has taken giant risks with the PS3 and non of them have paid off and realistically non of them ever will. Incurring huge losses for one whole generation to pave the way for the next is not a strategy a company like SONY would ever consider. Maybe SONY will learn from their mistakes by the time the PS4 rolls around, but by then it will most likely already be too late. That is my realist outlook on things.
cc_star | 13/12/2008 16:38
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The PS4 if there is one will be a PS3, with even more cores in the cell, a faster read speed on the Blu-ray drive, and hopefully a far more generous memory, as the 256+256 appears to be the only thing holding the ps3 back as it just doesn’t have the memory to get any more data on the screen than it does already (motorstorm 2 vs motorstorm being an example, and reports that uncharted 2 will look like uncharted 1)
So no matter how many things you can process at once in the cell, it don’t mean shit if there isn’t enough memory to display them.
That being said the development of the PS4 should be a piece of piss, I’m just not sure Sony’s pockets are deep enough for the fight!
kamiboy | 13/12/2008 16:54
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The thing that really gets me is this, the PS2 was the weakest console of the last generation and it kicked ass. It kicked ass for two reasons, good exclusive games and very, very cheap hardware. If the PS3 just didn’t have CELL and Blu-ray we wouldn’t even have this conversation. SONY would be pulling in monthly sales that would even put Nintendo to shame. With all the money they would have made they could have easily afforded to corner their competitors by paying third parties for exclusives.
In other words nothing would have changed from the last generation. God, if I could just get my hands on the people responsible for the CELL and Blu-ray being pushed onto the PS3, all the doctors in the world couldn’t put them back together again.
With SONY forgoing being competitive in 2008 in favour of focusing on not not loosing any more money and with 8000 jobs being prepped to be cut and with SONY looking to evaluate a “restructuring” of their gaming division I’ll say it is a pretty safe bet that SONY’s pockets are just about empty.
Uncle Billy gets to look on with glee biding his time to deliver the final blow. Loosing long time PS exclusives like final fantasy was a good start, further price drops and exclusivity agreements would have been the mercy stroke in 2009 if SONY didn’t have a few good first party games in waiting.
God of War III, Infamous, Uncharted 2, White Knight Chronicles and #ugh# even Killzone makes a fine lineup for 09. But I fear without a significant price drop (at least a 100 pounds or 200 dollars) they will do little to turn SONY’s fortunes. At least I know I have games to play for at least one more year though.
xvLIAMvx | 13/12/2008 21:44
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Oh Dear. Each to their own. And if I remember correctly – “uncle Billy lost his willy and landed in the hay”?