March NPD: Kratos Crowned King

The big stories in this month’s NPD figures are all the games. The PS3 had four titles in the top ten compared to two each for the 360, Wii and DS.  Kratos slashed and bludgeoned his way to the top with an impressive 1.1 million sales.  Final Fantasy XIII on the PS3 waited its turn to deliver a devastating combo and reached third spot with 828,200 sales, outselling the 360 version by over 300,000 copies.

That particular outcome may not be a surprise given that the Final Fantasy series has long been a PlayStation staple and owners of both consoles are likely to have picked up the version with prettier cut-scenes and fewer discs.  The outcome of the other PS3 vs. 360 version battle in this month’s software chart will not come as a surprise either.  Battlefield: Bad company 2 on the 360 outsold the PS3 version by a similar margin in the Land of the FPS.

The final PS3 title, and Sony’s second exclusive, propping up the chart at number ten is MLB 10: The Show.  The two new Pokemon games, SoulSilver and HeartGold, feature at two and five in the chart and if you were to role up their sales into a single total, as the NPD Group do with variations of hardware platforms, Pokemon would be the comfortable winner with 1.78m sales.

What I do not understand is why one version of the Pokemon game outsold the other by about 30%.  I would have expected a 50/50 split.  Can any of our Pokemon-loving (though obviously not in a carnal sense, there are other websites for that) readers help explain it?

Software Sales Chart

There is little worthy of note in the hardware sales chart where it is very much business as usual.  In the month where a new version of the DS, the DSi XL, launched in America, the DS has taken top spot in the charts.   After last month’s blip the Wii is back leading the home console race.

The 360 and the PS3 continue their tussle with Microsoft’s console coming out on top but only by a margin of 25,000, which is narrower than it has been in the past two months.  Once again, supply constraints are taking some of the blame for the PS3 not managing a stronger showing in a month of good software sales.

Luckily for us as well as the dry figures we also get some commentary fro NPD analyst Anita Frazier.  The entertainment comes from all the obvious statements.  For instance, this March was much better than the last.  Given how bad the economic outlook was a year ago and the impact it had on the video game sector, it is hardly a surprise that this year sales are up.

Perhaps the loudest “Well, d’uh!” response is reserved for Frazier’s observation that “Sony’s PS3 hardware posted its eighth consecutive month of year-over-year increases”.  If you count back eight months you arrive at last August.  Is it really news to anyone that since its price cut and concomitant launch of the Slim that the PS3 is selling better than it used to?

Were Scooby Doo to be reviewing the hardware sales and be sympathetic to Sony there would almost certainly be an exclamation of “Ruh-roh Raggy” when he read the last two figures on the chart.  After a few months of comfortably outselling the PS2, the PSP has once again slipped to within a relative handful of sales of its older brother.

If their sales continue their current trends, next month the PS2 will outsell the PSP in America like it has been in Japan for several months now.  Sony really need something to boost their handheld sales.

Hardware Sales Chart

Reports of sales figures should never be complete without a graph of some sort.  So this month I thought it would be interesting to take a look back over the last thirteen months of NPD hardware sales data.