While the sale of video games dropped 21 percent in the third quarter in Japan, sales reported in the UK and the United States continued to grow despite the very visible economic woes. NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track Ltd. and Enterbrain Inc. all reported that video game sales grew by 15 percent in the third quarter and 8 percent in the United States. Overall, the sales of the three combined markets rose just 1 percent with Japan keeping the figure down.
“2007 was a banner year for the Japanese software market with the titles released in the third quarter of 2008 not being as highly anticipated as those released during the same time period in 2007,” said Ricky Tanimoto, a global marketing analyst at Enterbrain. “Also, software titles generally have stronger launch sales in Japan, which represent a large percentage of the total sales in Japan compared to the US and Britain.”
He said that overall video games sales in Japan will be largely unaffected by economic problems during the holiday season. “New portable hardware systems like Sony’s PSP-3000 and Nintendo’s DSi will prove to be driving market forces in Japan throughout the 2008 holiday season,” he said. The UK market is gearing up for its best-ever fourth quarter performance.
The top title in the U.S. during the quarter was Madden NFL 09 with 2.96 million unit sales, followed closely by Nintendo’s Wii Fit at 1.28 million units. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed came in at third place with 1.42 million sales.
Result for: hardware systems
Thanks to recent price cuts across the board, the Xbox 360 outsold the Sony PlayStation 3 pretty handily in the US for the month of September despite both consoles combined selling less than the Wii for the period.
However, since the hardware was priced lower, total hardware revenue for the industry fell from $546 million USD year-on-year to $498 million USD.
According to the NPD data, Nintendo sold 687,000 consoles for the month, while Microsoft sold 347,000 units and Sony sold 232,000.
For the handheld market, the Nintendo DS continued to dominate, selling 537,000 units compared to 238,000 for the Sony PSP.
“Compared to August, nearly all hardware systems realised an increase in unit sales in September,” commented Anita Frazier of NPD.
“The price reduction on the Xbox 360 helped deliver a month-over-month unit sales increase for that platform of 78 per cent.”
