Jacob Mazel

NPD has totaled videogame sales for the USA over the four weeks ending January 31, 2009. Once again, as expected , Nintendo managed to sell record volumes of both videogame hardware and software even as the American unemployment rate crept toward double digits. The company sold 1.2m Wii and DS systems in the USA according to NPD figures. Vgchartz had estimated 1.3m Nintendo systems in the USA for the month. Sony managed to sell 476,000 PS2s, PS3s, and PSPs in January, against the VGC US prediction of 570,000 units. Microsoft sold 309,000 Xbox 360s in January according to NPD, against 340,000 predicted by VGC.

Some quick internet sleuthing reveals that the most units a videogame system had sold in January was 490,000 by NPD USA figures. PS2 set that record in 2005, but both DS (510,800) and Wii (679,200) beat that figure significantly this month. The January PS2 record was also after the notorious 2004 Christmas season when PS2s were in very short supply across the USA. When the PS2s alloted for Christmas finally arrived in January 2005, after marginally losing the December 2004 sales race to Microsoft's Xbox, Sony had a banner January instead of a great December.

Edit:

Some more internet sleuthing reveals that by NPD figures, Nintendo now has all 12 monthly hardware sales records (by units sold). The distribution of records is as follows as of January 2009:

Even excluding the GBA launch month, DS has the June monthly record, with 783,000 units sold in June 2008.

With the exception of the PSP, all figures are within 10% for the USA. In January 2008, NPD reported these hardware sales:

Year over year, the five Wiis were sold in January 2009 for every two Wiis sold in January 2008. Xbox 360 saw a 34% jump year over year on the ongoing momentum from price drops last fall. PS3 saw a 25% year over year drop from January 2008 to January 2009 largely because it did not have a price cut in 2008. PSP had a nearly identical drop year over year (by %) and for the same reason. PS2 sales are declining rapidly now, with the system selling 38% as well as it did last January. DS, with increased supply more than doubled its sales year over year despite the fact that 2009 is the fifth January on the market for the portable.

January sales in 2008 accounted for the following percentages of 2008 sales using NPD sales:

On average then, hardware sales for all of 2009 could be as much as 15 to 20 times the totals seen in January. If that is the case for all six platforms in 2009, total sales for the year could easily look like this:

Price cuts, big games and the recession will influence whether the final figures for the year end up close to those above, but against the context of last year it doesn’t look completely unreasonable. All of the numbers above could easily be 30% higher with the right kind of push.

For January, NPD reported that the following games were the top sellers for the month:

For the Americas, Vgchartz had reported the following top ten over the same period, with the caveat that multiplying by 0.9 is necessary to estimate for the USA market alone.

The return of the 2005 DS titles to both top ten lists is a reflection of two trends. First, Nintendo has begun re-advertising some of the older DS mega hits to new demographics. Secondly, these titles maintain a fairly steady attach rate to the DS itself, so when DS sales are high and console sales are low a 25%-30% attach rate is enough to return the old titles to the top ten. Had any of the consoles sold at a higher clip in January, the DS titles would not have appeared. For instance if Wii Music and Mario & Sonic sell to 20% of all new purchasers, then each game sold 135,000 units this month, missing the top ten by a slim margin. But if each game sells to 20% of all new purchasers and Wii had sold 800,000 units, one of the DS titles would have been pushed out. When key games begin to sell at a lower attach rate to new users platform demand begins to dry up.

One minor surprise for the month is the disappearance of Gears of War 2 after quickly becoming a platinum level hit in November and December.

Next month has a fairly healthy slate of releases, so it should be interesting to see if Nintendo, Actvision-Blizzard and Electronic Arts can maintain their death grip on the top ten.

Contact Vgchartz at jmazel@vgchartz.com