As expected, Microsoft continued to tout the fact that the Xbox 360 has surpassed 10 million units sold in the United States. Since they first made the announcement a few days ago, they’ve bumped that figure up to 10.1 million sold.
Surprisingly little from the press release Microsoft sent out had to do with figures that would stem from the 360 having been on the market for a year longer than the competition. That could be because they dedicated an entire portion of it to talking about how wonderful Grand Theft Auto IV has been performing on the 360. They even say it’s “outselling the other platform’s version by nearly 2:1 in the U.S.” — “other platform”? What’s up with that?
As it turns out, GameStop’s claim that 64% of all copies of GTA IV sold were on Xbox 360 was spot on — 64.9% is the exact number if you do the math with NPD’s numbers for the month of April. Between the 360 and PS3 versions of the game, GTA IV managed to sell 2.85 million even though it was released on April 29 — not too shabby.
Mario Kart Wii, meanwhile, sold more than a million copies. That’s a million plastic wheels out there in the wild, imparing people’s ability to control the game properly. And of course, with the number of Wii systems that sold in April, you know you’re going to see a lot of Wii Play sales, and that we did. Smash Bros. had a big drop off, from 2.7 million in March down to 326k in April. Not that Nintendo should be complaining, with five of their games in the top ten, with six of the top ten on Nintendo platforms.
April 2008 Software Sales
GTA IV (360) - 1.85M Mario Kart Wii w/ wheel (Wii) - 1.12M GTA IV (PS3) - 1.00M Wii Play (Wii) - 360,000 Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) - 326,000 Gran Turismo 5: Prologue (PS3) - 224,000 Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness (DS) - 202,000 Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time (DS) - 202,000 Guitar Hero III (Wii) - 152,000 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (360) - 141,000
Call of Duty 4 on 360 continues to do its best Mustafa impression, as it just refuses to be kicked out of the top ten. Could next month finally see it kicked out? I’m going to go ahead and predict a bold “no.”
I’m at a loss to really explain what happened in April; if you’re anything other than a Nintendo fan, you’re not going to be pleased with the hardware sales figures. Not a single system other than Nintendo’s duo managed to crack 200,000 units for the month of April in the US, according to the NPD Group.
April 2008 Hardware Sales (March numbers in parentheses):
Nintendo Wii - 714,200 (721,000)
Nintendo DS - 414,800 (698,000)
PlayStation Portable - 192,700 (297,000)
Xbox 360 - 188,000 (262,000)
PlayStation 3 - 187,100 (257,000)
PlayStation 2 - 124,400 (216,000)
Talk about a 50-50 split for the PS3 and 360 here in the US; just 900 units separated the two systems. Oddly enough, the rankings turned out to be exactly the same as in March, which is, in a way, good if you’re in the market for a Wii as Michael Pachter’s prediction that the Wii shortage would be resolving itself seems to have come true. Nearly 1.5 million consoles sold in two months means the system is out there in fairly large quantities.
Unfortunately, my archrival’s other predictions weren’t quite so accurate. The 360 and PS3 sold roughly 90k and 100k less, respectively, than he thought. But really, who would have thought the numbers would be so low this month?
A title like that doesn’t write itself very often, so I’m happy to take advantage. The new Rocketmen expansion pack, It Came From Uranus, is now available on the PlayStation Store. You’ll also now find two new Hot Shots Golf characters, each of which cost $.99, and are small enough that I reckon they’re already on the Blu-ray disc you hold in your hands.
Rounding out the DLC scene is this week’s installment of Rock Band tracks and 21 new Karaoke Revolution: American Idol tracks.
While Nintendo might be trying to get the indie developer crowd’s attention, mainstream developers have been taking advantage of WiiWare, too. Next Gen spoke with a few developers to see what they thought of the young platform and how it stacks up with the competition.
Why did you choose to develop the game for WiiWare rather than Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network?
David Braben, founder of Frontier: It was the way that you control the wind that was important and the control of the Wii was absolutely defined by that. We didn’t immediately think, ‘ah yes, it’s a WiiWare game,’ but we did think ‘oh, it’s a Wii game.’ There are games that use two Wii controls, where you have button combinations across the Wiimote and the Nunchuck, and that’s something that feels quite uncomfortable in my opinion. Then there are games that use the Wiimote purely as a pointer and don’t use the Nunchuck at all, but what we’re doing is subtly different in the sense that you’ve got one character controlled by the Wiimote, which is the wind, and the other where you’re directly controlling the character talking, and so it feels very natural to have the two controllers separated.
From a development point of view WiiWare is great. It means we can take bigger risks, we can experiment with new control mechanisms at less financial and commercial risk and I think that’s a fantastic thing.
Dave Grossman, Telltale Games design director: I do think that the Wii lends itself in particular to the kind of idea based gameplay that we do although ultimately I think we’d like it to be on all of the downloadable channels. The interface is meant to be very, very simple. You don’t need tons and tons of buttons but if you have something you can just point with that’s just great, so it was kind of an easier mindset for us to be on the Wii then perhaps on the other platforms, but obviously our games are meant to be simple and have a broad appeal and would probably be good on any of the downloadable channels.
Bill Swartz, Mastiff: The Wiimote was the killer, period. Does Xbox have a Wiimote? Honestly, we wanted to do a Wii game, we wanted to do a WiiWare game, that was really very much in the front of our minds, and we wanted to do something with a license attached. Tony Hawk was already taken. No seriously, I really didn’t want to go out there and just make up some random sport by myself, you know, let’s do a Marble Madness rip-off because no one’s done one for six months. That was really what we didn’t want to do. We wanted to do something with a license attached but the last thing I wanted to do was try to be a mini EA or a mini Activision or a mini Ubisoft because we’d get creamed. So we were looking for a sort of minor but cool license that had some value that would let us use the controls in a unique way and ideally something that hadn’t been done before. No one has done an eating game - well, at least an eating game like ours, and it has the advantage because it is so hand to mouth and that is a really neat way to use a Wii control.
I wonder what would happen if the 360 really did get its own Wiimote rip off. You can see more about what they had to say over at Next Gen.
A few weeks back, a story circulated that Hideo Kojima had said he was being limited by the hardware of the PlayStation 3. As it turns out, it was merely a poor translation that led to this. Kojima has clarified his comments and tried to better explain what he meant the first time around.
“I am Japanese, so I try to be modest. I’m an especially modest person. I don’t wish to brag about it and say, ‘I am the amazing Metal Gear guy’, or say, ‘This is the best one’, just like how Americans brag [about] stuff like this,” Kojima explained.
“Westerners do not have a tradition of modesty, so the statements are translated correctly but the original meaning is totally different.”
Why, thank you, Mr. Kojima. I like you, too.
He goes on to explain more of what he really meant. You can find the full translation at Kotaku.
Sony’s financial results for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2008 have revealed that Sony sold 9.24 million PlayStation 3 systems worldwide, up from 5.63 million in the previous fiscal year. The PlayStation Portable also had a solid year, selling 13.9 million units, which is 4.36 million more than last year.
The PlayStation 2 was just barely surpassed by the PSP though; the seven year old system managed to sell an amazing 13.73 million consoles. That’s down 980,000 from the previous year, but it doesn’t detract from how incredible it is that the system is selling better than the PS3 despite its age.
Additionally, the PlayStation 2’s install base has reached 154 million units, according to GI.biz.
The ten year plan seems to be in full effect with the PlayStation 2, but we’ll have to see just how much longer this momentum can continue to carry it.
Along with its announcements regarding the financial results for fiscal year 2008, Electronic Arts has also revealed that Sony systems dominated EA’s sales in the fourth quarter.
Surprisingly, the PlayStation 2 led the way with $166 million worth of sales, followed closely by the PlayStation 3 with $152 million. On the other consoles, EA did $128 million worth of sales, and just $75 million on Wii. Combined, the two Sony systems accounted for 61% of EA console games sold, which is a pretty substantial amount.
This news certainly bodes well for the continued move towards making the PlayStation 3 the lead platform on multiplatform games.
Sony has announced that a new firmware update has been released for PlayStation 3, which will bring the current version up to 2.35. If there are any features being added, Sony’s not saying, as PlayStation.Blog brings word that it’s a “minor update to improve stability of some PS3 titles.” Grand Theft Auto IV, perhaps?
Check back later today for an update on what’s been added to the PlayStation Store.
Ahead of last month’s NPD numbers being released, Microsoft has announced that the Xbox 360 is the first console this generation to surpass 10 million units sold in the United States. Global sales have now topped 19 million, which Microsoft claims is more than either the PS3 or Wii has sold. That’s what a year’s head start will do for you, I guess.
“This year will be the largest in the history of the video game industry, with Xbox 360 leading the charge in the U.S. and abroad,” said Don Mattrick, Microsoft senior VP of Interactive Entertainment Business in the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft. (phew) “History has shown us that the first company to reach 10 million in console sales wins the generation battle. We are uniquely positioned to set a new benchmark for the industry.”
The press release also boasted the 360’s leading attach rate, naturally. But with enough optimism to make a Brett Favre comeback seem like a good idea (that cynicism literally just killed half of Wisconsin), it’s definitely a big achievement for Microsoft. They’re going to need to work hard to fend off the competition and maintain the lead their head start provided them with.
It’s that time of the year, where we get to review financial results for the previous fiscal year. Sony has reported its results for the year ending on March 31, 2008, and it was generally good news as both revenues and profits were up from last year. Net income rose to $3.51 billion, which is almost 300% last year’s $1.2 billion. Much of the success can be attributed to the electronics division; those stupid Bravia ads must be working, because they posted record sales and operating income along with CyberShot cameras, reports GI.biz.
The videogame division also saw significant improvement, with sales increasing 26.3% over last year to $12.2 billion, closing the losses from $2.21 billion down to $1.18 billion. Sony claims this is thanks to lower production costs of the PS3 and a strong performance by the PSP, particularly in Japan.
The PlayStation 2 continuing to sell extremely well at $129 probably ain’t hurtin’, either.
Important Note: The chart you see above has no relevance to this story. But, it is, irrefutably, a chart. And this sort of story deserves a chart of some sort.
Okay, so if GameStop is any indication of how the rest of the retailers in the U.S. sold Grand Theft Auto IV, Microsoft saw its system cash in on 64% of sales for Rockstar’s game, while Sony only got 36% of the love in the game’s first week. But, as the numbers show, the PlayStation 3 actually had the better performance when you compare the number of systems that have been sold. (Thanks to Level Up for doing all the math so I didn’t have to.)
After reaching out to both Microsoft and Sony, Level Up got two very different takes, as you’d expect.
Microft’s Aaron Greenberg (the same one that ripped the PS3 recently) had this to say:
I think many people have been surprised to see how well GTA IV is selling on Xbox 360 given the history of the franchise. These sales results add GTA IV to a long list of franchises that have switched over from Playstation to find a new home on Xbox 360 similar to what happened last year with titles like Madden and Guitar Hero. As you have covered on Level Up in the past, the majority of third party franchises are being developed first on our platform so they end up playing best on Xbox 360 and when you combine that with Xbox Live, we expect this trend to continue as more multiplatform releases hit the market. With that said, it is fantastic to hear that we beat PS3 two to one on Grand Theft Auto sales from a major retailer like GameStop.
Sony marketing VP Peter Dille offered this take:
GameStop probably does a little bit better with the early adopter crowd. There’s a larger installed base right now on Xbox 360 than on PS3. So it’s not surprising that there’s going to be more selling on Xbox 360 than PS3. Having said that, we’re really excited about the ratio. If I had an installed base advantage of 3-1, I wouldn’t be crowing too much about a 60-40 sales advantage. We think it’s not as high as what GameStop’s telling you, if you look at [the full picture on] the national level. They’re outselling us, but not by that same margin, and it’s because of their installed base lead. With an installed base lead that’s close to 3-1, if you’re bragging about a 60-40 software split, it’s clear evidence that the Playstation 3 consumer is overindexing on GTA IV, and the Playstation brand loyalty that we’ve been talking about is bearing itself out in the marketplace as we speak.
Dille’s right, as the numbers proved, but does anyone else find it funny that for once Sony is actually using its smaller install base as an argument in their favor?
Microsoft went pretty number-crazy after Grand Theft Auto IV was released, claiming that 40% of new consoles sold with a copy of GTA, sales of the 360 increased 54% over the week prior to GTA’s release and, most notably, that about 60% of all copies of GTA sold in the US were the 360 version. We now have another source to back up that claim — GameStop, which says that 64% of all copies sold were for the 360, compared with 36% on PlayStation 3, in the game’s first week of availability.
There’s no doubt that this has to do with the larger install base of the 360 here in the US. But how exactly did the game perform compared with the relative install bases? As of March, the NPD group reports that 9.9 million Xbox 360 systems and 4.1 million PlayStation 3 systems had been sold. Now, without including the number of systems sold in April (which shouldn’t have too drastic an impact on these numbers, anyway), the 360 holds 70.7% of the total 360 and PS3 systems sold to the PS3’s 29.3%. So with 64% of the copies of GTA being sold on 360, Microsoft’s box actually underperformed compared with PlayStation 3.
You can see how the two companies will go about spinning sales of the game, but at least we can begin to see the reality of this matter.
PlayStation Home might still be far from where Sony wants it to be, but the public should be able to finally get its first hands-on look at it this November. Creative director Ron Festejo spoke with Eurogamer TV recently and told them that the beta currently contains between 8,000 and 10,000 users; a number which will be expanding further in or around July. Then in November the beta will be opened completely to the public.
Festejo also showed off the ability to launch a game from within Home to Eurogamer. You can check out the video of it here, but be warned: if the pronounciation of beta as “bee-tah” bothers you, you should steer clear.
Activision has announced a new milestone Guitar Hero has achieved. Not to be upstaged by the former guitar heroes at Harmonix, who recently announced that Rock Band had passed the 10 million songs downloaded mark, Activision announced at a recent conference call that Guitar Hero has surpassed the 15 million downloaded songs mark.
That’s certainly an impressive figure that’s larger than Harmonix’s, but these numbers do, after all, include Guitar Hero II on Xbox 360. A commenter on Xbox 360 Fanboy made the keen observation that these don’t necessarily reflect the number of songs purchased, and Guitar Hero has seen several free tracks released.
But it seems clear that both companies are finding DLC to be a profitable form of business. Not profitable enough, though, as the cash-in known as Guitar Hero: Aerosmith proves.
Welcome to the latest edition of Pachter Predicts, where Wedbush Morgan analyst and my sworn adversary Michael Pachter makes his predictions for the past month’s console sales here in the United States. For the second straight month, Pachter has predicted that the PlayStation 3 outsold the Xbox 360. (Although last month his prediction turned out wrong, as the 360 had a 5,000 unit edge over the PS3.)
Here are his predictions, with last month’s numbers in parentheses:
If Pachter turns out to be right, it looks like the 360 and PS3 won’t have seen a major boost in sales as many have thought they would. He attributes his predicted higher sales of the DS and Wii to their greater availability.
As for Grand Theft Auto IV, he expects it to have sold 3.3 million units in its first six days in the US alone, and also notes that he expects 20 games to have cracked the 100,000 unit mark in April, compared with only nine last year.
Those of you who still find yourself looking for a Wii, Pachter thinks that situation might be soon resolving itself: “We believe that Nintendo has diverted a significant portion of its available supply to Europe since April 2007, as the weakening dollar has made US sales less profitable for the company… We expect the supply situation will begin to improve over the next several months. We expect a surge in supply in the US for Wii Fit’s May 21 launch here, and believe we could see as many as 900,000 Wii units show up at retail this month (May).”
It’s funny to think about how things would have played out if things were the same as a year ago. With Microsoft, Moore would’ve either dismissed Home after seeing another delay or politely talked about how he’s interested in trying it. Instead, he’s now publicly voiced his disappointment as he seems very excited about the prospect of EA Sports taking advantage of Sony’s online hub.
When asked about the possibility of using Home, Moore told Eurogamer, “Yeah; I just wish it would ship. I [previously] questioned it a little bit, whether I’d want to wander around there. Phil Harrison showed me a demo - it’s very cool, but let’s go already. And so I’m disappointed that it’s been pushed back a little bit again.
“But I really hope it gets going and becomes that portal to the PlayStation Network and we can utilise it. But boy, I just wish we’d get going.”
I think a lot of PlayStation 3 gamers that are looking forward to Home (myself included) share that sentiment. 10-year life cycle or not, let’s get moving, Sony.
The PlayStation Store has gotten a great update this week with three solid demos, new music for both Guitar Hero IIIand Rock Band, the expansion pack to PixelJunk, PixelJunk Monsters Encore ($5.99), and Rocketmen: Axis of Evil ($9.99). In addition to all that, there’s a number of trailers for games and movies, including an Iron Man trailer and one for WipEout HD and Mercenaries 2.
For the most part, executives from Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo don’t usually have too harsh of words for one another; they’ll talk up their respective consoles quite a bit, but that’s usually the extent of it. But that’s not always the case, as we learned from a new Destructoid interview with Aaron Greenberg, the director of product management for Xbox 360 and Live.
The interview focused on the success of Grand Theft Auto IV, and while Greenberg took a veiled shot at Sony for the problems that have been reported with the online play on PS3, he didn’t say much until he was asked about the PS3’s 2008 prospects. Destructoid asked if Greenberg thought that the 360 had enough to fend off the PS3 and its growing momentum with MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, Resistance 2, and Home.
[D]idn’t Sony promise all of this last year including Home as well? We have been fighting Sony’s promises from the day we entered the market and if you remember at that time it was all about PS2 being an online cybercity with partner announcements from the likes of RealNetworks and AOL. Then three years ago at E3 they showed what PS3 games would supposedly look like with the Killzone 2 video, that we are now learning will ship four years later. That means that we will have shipped Gears of War and Gears of War 2 before they can even get Killzone out the door. Think back to GDC 2007 when Sony promised to leap ahead in online with the Sony Home unveil. Here we are two years later and multiple delays for a product that has appears to have little to no buzz. Where are the achievements? The friends list integration across all games? Where is the long-promised video store? Where are all the other products using and networking with their CELL chip? How come Blu-ray did not result in better games? What happened with Sixaxis and rumble? Where is the complete 1080p game library we were promised? If Blu-ray as they said would be such a catalyst to PS3 console sales, then why have PS3 sales over the past couple months not seen any lift since the format victory?
There are indeed inaccuracies in there; it’s only been a little over a year since Home was unveiled, and the PS3 has outsold the 360 most months this year, even in the US. He does raise some good points as well, but I mean, jeeze — do you really peg this as something you’d hear an executive say publicly?
The beginning of the trailer you see above certainly looks like it’s for Killzone, but if you wait it out you’ll see the super-cool outfits that have been designed for the little sack guys to make them look like they came straight out of Killzone. Presumably they were only able to do it since it’s a first party game, but imagine the possibilities — Ratchet &Clank, Uncharted, or any of the other PS3 exclusives that could have a sack version made for LBP.
Aside from that, I didn’t find anything else particularly interesting. That’s not to say it doesn’t look good; it looks phenomenal, but I already came to that conclusion the first time I saw the game.
If you could have any character made into a sack boy or girl, who would you most like to see?
Welcome to the latest edition of Pachter Predicts, where Wedbush Morgan analyst and my sworn adversary Michael Pachter makes his predictions for the past month’s console sales here in the United States. For the 
For the most part, executives from Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo don’t usually have too harsh of words for one another; they’ll talk up their respective consoles quite a bit, but that’s usually the extent of it. But that’s not always the case, as we learned from a new 
