May Game Sales Data
The NPD Group released its monthly hardware sales data for May late this past week. Sales for both consoles and software were strong. As has been regularly the case for the past few months, Nintendo dominated both full–size and portable hardware categories. Overall, hardware sales accounted for $319m in revenue for the month.
Home consoles accounted for $221m, an increase of 79% over the same period last year. The Nintendo Wii led with 338k units sold. The Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 finished second and third with 188k and 155k units respectively. The PlayStation 3 continued to struggle relative to the competition with only 82k units sold.
In the Portables category, revenue was up 45% over the same month for last year with approximately $98m in sales. The Nintendo DS sold an impressive 423k units following a strong showing in April when they sold 471k units. 221k units of Sony’s PlayStation Portable were sold.
Software sales for the month were also strong with a total of approximately $381m in revenue. Consoles accounted for $274m of that figure and portables, $106m. Both console and portable software sales were up more than 30 percent relative to the same monthly data last year.
Nintendo, Activision and Electronic Arts were the leading game publishers for the month with 22%, 20% and 17% of the market respectively. Disney, which recently announced a plan to triple game development spending to around $350m by 2009, and is aggressively trying to develop the ability to build games around its feature franchises (like Pirates of the Caribbean), broke into the top ten with 3% market share (placing them at number 9 on the list of top ten publishers for May).
The numbers for May:
Hardware
- Nintendo DS: 423,000
- Wii: 338,000
- PlayStation Portable: 221,000
- PlayStation 2: 188,000
- Xbox 360: 155,000
- PlayStation 3: 82,000
- GameBoy Advance: 81,000
Games
- Pokémon Diamond (DS – Nintendo) 331,200
- Mario Party 8 (Wii – Nintendo) 314,400
- Spider-Man 3 (PS2 – Activision) 248,700
- Pokémon Pearl (DS – Nintendo) 238,000
- Wii Play (with Wii Remote – Wii) 249,000
- Forza Motorsport 2 (360 – Microsoft) 217,300
- Guitar Hero II (with Guitar – Xbox 360 – Activision) 183,600
- Spider-Man 3 (360 – Activision) 139,800
- Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars (360 – Electronic Arts) 137,700
- Guitar Hero II (with Guitar – PS2 – Activision) 130,900
