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NPD Sales Results for January 2009

Neo C.

Member
C.T. said:
That has nothing to do with xenophobism at all. A lot of western countries suffer; it's called demographic change. It's usually a natural process caused by the increasing average age of citizens. Immigration is a little factor and no answer to the problem in general.
Actually, both are responsible for the current development of economy. Most western countries suffer from the demographic change (or more precisely: the inability to find a solution for it), but some suffer less due to an efficient immigration (means: the ability to find the specialists which aren't in the country available). Brain drain is a serious problem in a lot of nation economies, while others gain massive advantages of it.
 
So PS3 had very few games at the top of the charts. While certainly failing to meet some of the software marks it did last year or the year before could be a Bad Thing, I want to say again that looking at a finite number of games that did the very best will always tend to overstate the presence of the dominant consoles. Even if buying patterns were identical among platforms, they'll simply have more games able to pass over whatever the threshold is. Since it's hard to come by lots of real figures, I just cooked up some random ones to play with.

I created a list of 100 random figures for each consoles. Each has a different max, with lower numbers being much more possible. For Wii I've set the max at 400K. For X360, 300K. For PS3, 200K. As things worked out, the total for these 300 games came out to

Wii: 5,361,218 (47.9%)
X360: 3,451,092 (30.8%)
PS3: 2,377,581 (21.2%)

But what about when we combine these lists and choose an arbitrary number from the top?

Top 5 (#5 game: 242,463)
Wii: 1,333,054 from 5 games (100.0%)
X360: 0 from 0 games (0.0%)
PS3: 0 from 0 games (0.0%)

Top 10 (#10 game: 168,535)
Wii: 1,891,860 from 8 games (84.1%)
X360: 358,158 from 2 games (15.9%)
PS3: 0 from 0 games (0.0%)

Top 20 (#20 game: 129,473)
Wii: 2,595,414 from 13 games (71.3%)
X360: 911,943 from 6 games (25.1%)
PS3: 131,542 from 1 game (3.6%)

Top 30 (#30 game: 97,341)
Wii: 3,214,541 from 19 games (68.1%)
X360: 1,258,799 from 9 games (26.7%)
PS3: 250,094 from 2 games (5.3%)

Top 40 (#40 game: 80,384)
Wii: 3,569,051 from 23 games (63.8%)
X360: 1,512,961 from 12 games (27.0%)
PS3: 514,281 from 5 games (9.2%)

Top 50 (#50 game: 67,912)
Wii: 4,015,559 from 29 games (63.4%)
X360: 1,651,870 from 14 games (26.1%)
PS3: 667,904 from 7 games (10.5%)

Top 100 (#100 game: 36,804)
Wii: 4,669,542 from 42 games (53.1%)
X360: 2,595,609 from 34 games (29.5%)
PS3: 1,524,713 from 24 games (17.3%)

Top 200 (#200 game: 9,381)
Wii: 5,246,804 from 70 games (48.3%)
X360: 3,352,618 from 69 games (30.9%)
PS3: 2,260,245 from 61 games (20.8%)

Of course this is not a perfect reflection of sales reality. There won't be an identical number of games on each console, the sales spread won't be so random and even between nothing and the maximum, and so on.
 

Rolf NB

Member
JoshuaJSlone said:
Since it's hard to come by lots of real figures, I just cooked up some random ones to play with.
I just found Jokeropia posted these, I'm not sure we've discussed them properly yet:

15l.jpg


They aren't for the full year unfortunately, but they are still significantly better than random.

edit:
Pixel counting: 1 pixel ~=> 957.4k units
All Jan-Sep, obviously
Code:
360 2008  26.0px => 24.9M
PS2 2008 27.5px => 26.3M
PS3 2008 17.0px => 16.3M
Wii 2008 35.5px => 34.0M
NGC 2008  1.0px => 1.0M*
XBX 2008 1.5px => 1.4M*

*margin of error on these two is > 30%, so beware
I'm not pulling handheld counts because there's more precision to be had when sourcing them from the handhelds-only chart.

Console splits deduced from there:
360:pS2:pS3:Wii ~= 25:26:16:33
360:pS3:Wii ~= 33:22:45
360:pS3 ~= 60:40

edit edit:
17642t.png


LTD hardware share averaged over the Jan-Sep period:
360:pS3:Wii ~= 42:18:40

Month-to-month hardware share averaged over the Jan-Sep period (="YTD" share through Sep 2008):
360:pS3:Wii ~= 22:24:54

Now compare that again to the software shares from the Nintendo chart:
360:pS3:Wii ~= 33:22:45

For all three, software shares are proportional to on some middle ground between LTD hardware base and ongoing rate of hardware sales.
There are no outliers either way.
 
bcn-ron said:
LTD hardware share averaged over the Jan-Sep period:
360:pS3:Wii ~= 42:18:40

Month-to-month hardware share averaged over the Jan-Sep period (="YTD" share through Sep 2008):
360:pS3:Wii ~= 22:24:54

Now compare that again to the software shares from the Nintendo chart:
360:pS3:Wii ~= 33:22:45

For all three, software shares are proportional to some middle ground between LTD hardware base and ongoing rate of hardware sales.
There are no outliers either way.
Interesting. It makes sense in general that both userbase from the past, and multiple purchases from new users would have a strong effect, but it's quite something that the software works out to so near to a direct split between those measures.

Though it's certainly less safe to try to apply something like that to a much smaller timeframe, for January it'd work out something like...
360:pS3:Wii YTD/current/monthly share 26:17:57
360:pS3:Wii LTD share averaging the after-December and after-January versions 36:18:46
Halfway between those two 31:17:52
 

u_neek

Junior Member
Square Enix have released their wordwide software numbers from April 1 through Dec 31 2008. Not sure if it has been posted yet so feel free to start a new thread as I don't have the rights to do so :)

I'm actually a bit surprised by the IU/LR numbers. And Crisis Core must be around 2m worldwide by now.

Edit: Actually, Kotaku has some LTD numbers: http://kotaku.com/5154094/what-games-were-selling-april-+-december-2008
Crisis Core - Final Fantasy VII - (PSP)
Japan: 820,000
North America: 660,000
Europe: 480,000
Life-to-date: 1.96 million

Final Fantasy IV (DS)
Japan: 610,000
North America: 290,000
Europe: 180,000
Life-to-date: 1.08 million

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 (DS)
Japan: 310,000
North America: 220,000
Europe: 120,000
Life-to-date: 650,000

Dragon Quest IV (DS)
Japan: 1.19 million
North America: 110,000
Europe: 150,000
Life-to-date: 1.45 million

hx2ade.jpg
 

Rolf NB

Member
JoshuaJSlone said:
Interesting. It makes sense in general that both userbase from the past, and multiple purchases from new users would have a strong effect, but it's quite something that the software works out to so near to a direct split between those measures.

Though it's certainly less safe to try to apply something like that to a much smaller timeframe, for January it'd work out something like...
360:pS3:Wii YTD/current/monthly share 26:17:57
360:pS3:Wii LTD share averaging the after-December and after-January versions 36:18:46
Halfway between those two 31:17:52
I found it pretty shocking that PS2 software still edged out Xbox 360 (and PS3 too of course, by a much wider margin). ASP was probably way low, but I had thought it had already lost so much mindshare and retail shelf space that it just couldn't compete anymore either way.
 

Jokeropia

Member
bcn-ron said:
I'm not pulling handheld counts because there's more precision to be had when sourcing them from the handhelds-only chart.
You got pretty high precision that way but here's a console only chart just for reference:

13l.jpg
 

Karma

Banned
Jokeropia said:
You got pretty high precision that way but here's a console only chart just for reference:

13l.jpg

Anyone pixel count this yet? Love to have the raw numbers.

edit: Nevermind I see someone already did.
 
JoshuaJSlone said:
I want to say again that looking at a finite number of games that did the very best will always tend to overstate the presence of the dominant consoles.

That's quite an interesting exercise, and I think it makes its point very well. Thanks.

I also think that the people who need that point made to them won't pay much attention...:p
 

jvm

Gamasutra.
bcn-ron said:
I found it pretty shocking that PS2 software still edged out Xbox 360 (and PS3 too of course, by a much wider margin). ASP was probably way low, but I had thought it had already lost so much mindshare and retail shelf space that it just couldn't compete anymore either way.
For what it's worth, Pachter expects PS2 (and Xbox, GameCube, GBA) to account for less than 5% of the U.S. market in 2009. Pretty sure that's a comment about $ sales, not units.
 
Link said:
Ok, I'm not going to go through your post point-by-point because it's late, and I'm not even sure why we're arguing this particular situation. The bottom line is going by your scenario, the Wii should be getting a ton of big games starting this year, right? Why don't we just wait and see how that goes.

Who said anything about the Wii this is a comparison of the SNES vs the PSX...
 
bcn-ron said:
I found it pretty shocking that PS2 software still edged out Xbox 360 (and PS3 too of course, by a much wider margin). ASP was probably way low, but I had thought it had already lost so much mindshare and retail shelf space that it just couldn't compete anymore either way.

How many PS2 titles even charted in 2008?

Just goes to show how much the highly frontloaded sales on the PS3/360 combined with just getting info on the top sellers distort our view of the sales situation.
 

Link

The Autumn Wind
Flying_Phoenix said:
Who said anything about the Wii this is a comparison of the SNES vs the PSX...
Yes, but why are we having this argument? I realized halfway through my first long reply to you that I have no idea what it has to do with any of this.
 

Rolf NB

Member
I'm pixel-counting the console-only chart now, but for 2007, not 2008. Different data. Let's check whether what I said earlier holds for that as well.

130px <=> 100M units
1px <~=> 769.2k units

Jan-Sep software units (NPD via Nintendo)
Code:
360 2007 28.0px => 21.5M
GCN 2007  6.5px =>  5.0M
PS2 2007 43.0px => 33.1M
PS3 2007  7.0px =>  5.4M
Wii 2007 16.0px => 12.3M
XBX 2007  7.5px =>  5.8M

Software market splits in the period:
360:pS2:pS3:Wii ~= 30:46:7:17
360:pS3:Wii ~= 55:14:31
360:pS3 ~= 80:20


LTD hardware share averaged over the period:
360:pS3:Wii ~= 58:14:28

Monthly hardware shares averaged over the period (="YTD 2007" share through September):
360:pS3:Wii ~= 33:17:50


Now we go back to the software market split and observe whether or not that is the happy middle ground between LTD hardware shares and month-to-month hardware shares:
360:pS3:Wii ~= 55:14:31

Answer: the software sales shares are still bounded by the two hardware shares, but they are farther away from their medium than the 2008 results. The LTD hardware share seems dominant. Which is to say that software sales for all three platforms were almost exactly proportional to their LTD hardware shares from Jan through Sep 2007.
 
So Dragon Quest IV did about half Final Fantasy Tactics A2's number, and a third of FFIV DS's total (in the US)? That's actually not bad considering it's been out less time and is a less known property in the US. I would hope DQV's sales will be a little bit better; is VI already coming out for sure in the US?
 

dork

Banned
question. Im writing a paper/doing a speach on something related to this topic


PlayStation 2 101.2K
PlayStation 3 203.2K
PSP 172.3K
Xbox 360 309K
Wii 679.2K
Nintendo DS 510.8K

is that the Amount of systems sold in the month of january worldwide?
 
dork said:
question. Im writing a paper/doing a speach on something related to this topic


PlayStation 2 101.2K
PlayStation 3 203.2K
PSP 172.3K
Xbox 360 309K
Wii 679.2K
Nintendo DS 510.8K

is that the Amount of systems sold in the month of january worldwide?

Those are just the sales numbers for the US in the January NPD period (4th to 31st).
 

DMeisterJ

Banned
dork said:
question. Im writing a paper/doing a speach on something related to this topic


PlayStation 2 101.2K
PlayStation 3 203.2K
PSP 172.3K
Xbox 360 309K
Wii 679.2K
Nintendo DS 510.8K

is that the Amount of systems sold in the month of january worldwide?

No, just the U.S. (Doesn't include Canada and Mexico)
 
dork said:
question. Im writing a paper/doing a speach on something related to this topic


PlayStation 2 101.2K
PlayStation 3 203.2K
PSP 172.3K
Xbox 360 309K
Wii 679.2K
Nintendo DS 510.8K

is that the Amount of systems sold in the month of january worldwide?
no thats usa only
 
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