August NPD Numbers Look Good For Wii, 360

To add a little more context to yesterday's announcement that the Wii had outsold the 360 worldwide, we have August's NPD numbers courtesy of 1up. From the article: "The story hasn't changed much -- Wii remains on top, PlayStation 3 continues to have trouble gaining steam and Xbox 360 maintains a position behind Wii but gaining momentum as the fall season moves into gear-- but the numbers have shifted. Encouraging news for Microsoft, however, as Xbox 360 moves nearly 100,000 more units compared to last month's 170,000, while Madden NFL 08 pushes 896,600 boxes and BioShock moves 490,900 copies -- impressive numbers for the Xbox 360 platform, software-wise. Nintendo must be happy with the performance of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, as the latest sci-fi Samus Aran shooter managed 218,100 copies in late August, with Wii Play (released in January) only beating it by nearly 50,000 units."

Re:Wii vs 360 vs PS3

[king-manic]

Latest /. discussion has been focused entirely on hardware numbers. Lately it has been Wii > 360 > PS3.

If you look internationally it's Wii > Ps3 > 360 by a slight margin for the last 4 months now. The 360 is doing really well in America but far worse in other markets.

Re:Nintendo and the fragile game market...

[hibiki_r]

Twilight princess and God of War don't really have that much to do with each other. If you want more combat than Zelda, then it's not an issue of quality, but an issue of what you want out of a game. You might as well say that neither of the two games has enough zombies, so Resident Evil is better.

There are very few games that try to do something similar to Zelda: I only remember two off the top of my head, the Dark Cloud series and Okami. I'd put dark cloud well under TP, and Okami rather even quality wise.

Re:wii has less games?

[brokeninside]

Top twenty list for August broken down by platform:
XBox 360: 5
Wii: 5
DS: 4
PS/2: 3
PSP: 1
PS/3: 1
Xbox: 1

Obviously this doesn't reflect the entire catalog. It does, however, suggest that the Wii catalog is selling just fine. The linked article only listed number of units for the top 10 games. There, the 1.3M games units were sold for the 360 vs. the 0.7M game units for the Wii. But the top ten has only 2 360 titles vs. 4 titles for the Wii. Obviously, the market thinks that the Wii has a decent catalog of games.

Re:Christmas should be interesting

[tlhIngan]

I don't know about anywhere else in the country (or world for that matter) but as someone that has been "casually" looking locally for a Wii since it launched, I have yet to see *ANY* sitting on the shelf of any store I have been to in South East Texas. This includes Walmart, Target and the like, as well as Hastings (a book and music and movie chain, same people that started and own NetFlix I believe), as well as EB Games and Gamestop.

I don't know, but I've seen shipments at the big electronics retailer (like Circuit City or Best Buy - not sure if you have them) at least once a week, and they tend to last 1-2 days. In Canada, one retailer I visit regularly (because it's down the block from work) gets 80-100 every week. Takes 'em usually around 1-2 days before they're completely sold out. But it's better than it was a few months ago, where they sold out in 20 minutes.

EB Games/Gamestop tends to probably get around 10 or so, so they go quickly since everyone tries there first. Ditto with the other stores - for some reason or other, they get really small shipments. Then again, they probably have tons in the back and only bring out two...

Re:Wii vs 360 vs PS3

[KDR_11k]

Expenses for developing a Wii game are lower so you don't need as many sales to reach break-even.

Also a developer starting a game now will look at the hardware growth to see what the userbases will probably be like by the time the game is done so the Wii's higher per-month sales make it look much more attractive.