The November Videogame Market By the Numbers

Along with the news that more than half of the US is playing games, the November NPD numbers offer an interesting insight into the games industry. The ongoing console war was white hot, with record hardware sales. The Wii outsold the PS3 by half a million systems last month, and is quickly gaining on the Xbox 360's total sales figures. The big winners last month were software publishers, though, with a record $1.3 billion in sales. "Obviously Call of Duty 4 performed well on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. It is now second only to Halo 3 for first-month sales numbers on the Xbox 360. On the PlayStation 3 no other game has launched as well as Call of Duty 4 in November. Super Mario Galaxy performed extremely well for its first month. Two new properties - Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect - sold well enough to make the top 10. Across both platforms, Assassin's Creed was actually the second best selling game of the month. It is amusing to note that despite the unprecedented Nintendo DS and PSP sales, no game for either system sold well enough to make the top 10 software list for November."

If this is a manufactured shortage...

[seebs]

You can only wonder how many systems the people claiming Nintendo is manufacturing this shortage think are being produced.

Re:Call me when it's over.

[SparkleMotion88]

Sorry, there will always be a "console war." The war is caused because a large number of people can only afford to buy one console. These people choose the one that they think will be the best console. Once their purchase is made, they will fight to convince everyone (including themselves) that their console is the best because, more than anything else, people like to believe that they made the best decision. So you can't end the "console war" without changing human nature.

This sort of behavior happens any time a decision has been made and there is a conflict over that decision, and is caused by several well-known cognitive biases (mostly originating from confirmation bias [wikipedia.org]).

Re:360 In Serious Trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

People in Europe don't particularly like microsoft and their antics. Europe went nuts over the PS and PS2, they like what they get with the Sony consoles and seem to be sticking with it. Most of my friends won't entertain getting a 360 even back when there was no PS3. Halo has been the only real magnate for the xbox machines.

Those of us that have the have the Wii, are bored pretty with it. No one really wants a crap version of what they can get on a PS3, the Wii's graphic are really shit when you're used to HD gaming on a big screen with surround sound. Friends come around and have a laugh on Wii sports, but then want to get on with real gaming in true next-gen glory. So no interest or desire to give money to microsoft, an apathetic interest in the Wii, leaves just one thing.

Re:Call me when it's over.

[mr_mischief]

In a product field like game consoles, confirmation bias can coincide with enlightened self-interest or can fill the same logical need. The more people think Console A is great and represents the future direction of all consoles, the more content gets targeted to Console A. If this is in addition to another console or in place of another console that would have been the exclusive target for that content, then it's a win for the owner of Console A. It's one of the few instances in which a format war or platform war actually benefits people.

Unfortunately, the people often pick the technically inferior platform or format. Beta was superior to VHS but was more expensive. In the short term, VHS was more suitable because of its price. It became a shorter-term solution than Beta could have been, because Beta is (a bit) closer to DVD quality with video and closer to DVD in audio quality. The IBM PC was in many ways inferior to the MicroVax, the Alpha, the Sun workstations, the SGI workstations, the Apollo, the Amiga, the Mac,and even the Color Computer 3. It has caught up pretty well, and surpassed the older systems that never got established or that were allowed to die. It's difficult to argue that the Intel x86 line was originally an elegant design, but it was made primarily to run 8080 and 8085 code with minimal porting effort and was not a fresh design like the Motorola 68000. It won based on its business case, so it's difficult to blame Intel for it.

So yeah, confirmation bias is one part of it. People really do want to own the platform that gets the best games, though. The little control consumers have over that is to lobby other consumers to make the platform more attractive for game studios and to lobby the game studios directly. Either way could be interpreted as confirmation bias, or confirmation bias could be interpreted as attempting to protect one's investment. They could even coincide between an unconscious (or semiconscious) decision and a conscious decision which reinforce one another.

Re:Call me when it's over.

[magus_melchior]

Compared to the PS2 and 360, yes, but Sony was still pounded by Nintendo in Japan last week. I think that the market in Japan is becoming more geared towards mobile platforms (DS and PSP are doing exceptionally well), although your point about the 360 stands.

(The ranking page [m-create.com]. Note that they use the common abbreviations for all but one of the various consoles. This charts the software sales over the past week, sorted by the last column. At the bottom of the page is another chart with, presumably, the hardware sales of the consoles over the past week.)

Re:Call me when it's over.

[king-manic]

Their at about 1/3 of the wii. The Wii is a smashing beyond all hope success. I'd argue that the PS3 is doing well compared to the outrageous success of the wii. Sales plotted against the 360 world wide sees the PS3 at roughly the same spot the 360 was last year. So it's going to be a three horse race with competition for 2nd. Competition is always good. Because frankly, despite the success most Wii games aren't my cup of tea. I love fire emblem but almost the entire rest of the library is aimed at someone other then me.