Video Game Sales Make Surprise Plunge in April

[Jin]

There were no finals in April last year?

[Zargabaath]

Also one thing I don't see in this report as a possible reason to why sales are down is maybe because games are being pushed out so fast people don't have time to complete the titles they have before another one is released. And with the few limited titles I have had the pleasure to play as of late. They seem to be over priced, rushed, poorly exicuted, poorly designed and very cookie cutterish.

Game wise the article does give some reason as to why sales weren't huge: no big releases for the month. The biggest release was Splinter Cell selling a bit under 500,000. For the first 3 months of this year the gaming market had some pretty big releases scattered throughout them.

Why is this surprising? From what I recall and with only a few exceptions, game and console sales have been declining (year over year) since 2008.

So far this at the end of April, the PS3 is up 41% from '09 and the Wii is 2.67% up from the same year. The Xbox 360 is down around 5% since this time last year. Also same time (end of April of '09) the sales for all three consoles were up from their '08 numbers. It may be a stretch to say that sales have been down since '08 since we are hardly in 2010. The Xbox 360 had around 500,000 less systems sold in '09 compared to '08. The Wii was a little under 2 million less, but had a total of 22 + million for '09 - still great. The PS3 had a little over 3 million more sales in '09 than in '08 and it is 1.1 million units ahead of '09's numbers.


An interesting note is since the slim model of the PS3 came out, worldwide the Xbox 360 has never toped the PS3 in weekly sales which translates into monthly and to-date sales.