In a sense, I guess everyone does win in December. But the releases sent to us by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft on December’s NPD data all seem to point to their victories over something, and mostly over each other.
Nintendo proudly proclaims that their Wii and DS ended up being the No. 2 and No. 1 best selling systems in the US for 2007. The DS won, moving 8.5 million units last year; almost half of those were sold in November and December. The Wii sold 6.3 million in 2007, and even with shortages, they still moved 2.3 million in the holiday season. Super Mario Galaxy managed to sell about the same amount (2.5 million) in the same time frame!
Microsoft shamelessly announces that they lead the industry in their release. They actually do when it comes to dollars spent in 2007, with $4.8 billion spent on Xbox 360 this year versus Wii’s $3.5m and PS3’s $2.2m. They did really well in December, selling 1.3 million consoles to bring up their install base to 9.2 million. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was their ass kicker, selling 1.5 million copies of the Xbox 360 version.
Sony continues their humble approach, and they don’t really claim victory over anything other than their old sales records. That’s probably out of necessity, but they still did pretty well in December. The last month of 2007 was the PS3’s biggest month since launch. They moved 798,000 units, which is a 60 percent increase from last year at the same time. The new PSP had a strong showing with 1.1 million units sold in December. which is up 87 percent from November. Sony’s biggest selling title was actually a PS2 game, Guitar Hero III, which sold 800,000 units.
