An independent marketing group, the NPD, recently released information regarding the various facts and figures that collectively represent the behavior of the video game market collectively during the first month of 2008. According to the data collected by the NPD Group, there was a drop in the sales of various types of video game hardware, which amounted to 1.227 million units, which represents a shortage of 23.86% over the predicted sales of 1.611 million units.

The NPD Group uncovered that this drop in hardware sales was due to the continuing supply difficulties that Nintendo experiences with its Nintendo Wii console, which led to 274,000 sales of the Wii console, which was well below the predicted 396,000 units sold. The Nintendo DS also fell short of sales, as final sales of the Nintendo handheld console were 251,000 units sold, as opposed to the 483,700 Nintendo DS’s that were expected to be sold.

However, not all of the consoles were suffering, as the PS3 accomplished the never before seen feat of exceeding the sales of the Xbox 360 by over 28.5%, while the Xbox 360 failed to perform by a factor of 20.3%. Last month the PS3 sold 269,000 consoles with only 230,000 Xbox 360’s sold. The predicted sales for Sony’s PSP, on the other hand, were spot on with 230,000 PSPs sold, which was completely in line with the sales forecast.

In terms of copies of video game sold in January things shifted into high gear, as video game sales leapt from roughly 550 million dollars to roughly 610 million dollars, which is an increase of 11%. Call of Duty 4, developed by Activision, was king of the hill in terms of sales last month, as the Xbox 360 version sold 330,900 copies, which was slightly below the forecast of 359,700 copies, while sales of the Super Mario Galaxy title fell, and fell hard, as the sales figures for Super Mario Galaxy only resulted in 172,000 copies, which was far below the predicted total of 359,700 copies.

The Wii version of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock rallied back strongly, however, with sales of the Wii version totaling 239,600 copies sold, which was a 36% increase over the predicted 175,900 copies. This easily trumped the Xbox 360 version, which resulted in a total of 183,800 copies sold which was roughly 7 percent lower than the 197,300 total predicted.

Source: http://www.thesimexchange.com/blogpost.php?post_id=474