Game Consoles – NPD Sales Figures – 2008 Year in Review

Now that the December 2008 NPD figures have been made available, and I have posted the analysis, I have now covered a complete year in terms of NPD figures and so it’s fitting to now take a look at 2008 through the NPD figures, but mainly concentrating on the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii.

The total hardware sales figures for 2008 are as follows:

  • Wii: 10,171,000
  • DS: 9,951,000
  • Xbox 360: 4,735,000
  • PSP: 3,829,500
  • PS3: 3,544,100
  • PS2: 2,502,700

This is a breakdown of these numbers, for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii:

NPD 2008: Console hardware sales breakdown

NPD 2008: Console hardware sales breakdown

As you can see, the Wii totally dominated, with the Xbox 360 having a slight lead over the PS3 thanks to the PS3’s stronger numbers at the beginning of the year and the Xbox 360’s stronger numbers towards to the end. To further illustrate this point, let’s have a look at the graphs for the Xbox 360/PS3, broken down for the first half of the year and then the second:

NPD 2008: Hardware Sales, 1st half of year

NPD 2008: Hardware Sales, 1st half of year

NPD 2008: Hardware Sales, 2nd half of year

NPD 2008: Hardware Sales, 2nd half of year

Quite a turnaround for the Xbox 360 and the PS3. PS3’s slight lead in the first half of 2008 turned into a big deficit in the second. 

Now let’s look at game sales. Looking only at the monthly number one titles, here there are:

NPD 2008: Monthly Number One's

NPD 2008: Monthly Number One's

NPD 2008: Monthly Number One's

NPD 2008: Monthly Number One's

The ‘sea of green’ will make Microsoft very happy indeed, although the Wii did very respectably with only two entries out of 12. Sony will be disappointed that Little Big Planet and Resistance did not take the number one spot. And with their only number one title occurring in the first half of the year, it further underlines the loss of momentum in the second half.

But only looking at the number one titles don’t really tell us all that much. By extending it to the top 10, we then have the following breakdown in terms of the number of titles sold for each format:

  • Wii: 22,077,100 (46.61%)
  • Xbox 360: 18,924,600 (39.95%)
  • PS3: 6,367,200 (13.44%)
NPD 2008: Monthly Top 10 Games

NPD 2008: Monthly Top 10

Nintendo’s domination is now showing up, because Wii Play, Wii Fit and Mario Kart always makes the top 10. The Xbox 360 is still holding on admirably, and the PS3 is doing better because it is now managing to get one or two titles in the top 10 (but as mentioned before, only once at the number one spot). 

But even just looking at the top 10 doesn’t give us a whole picture of the actual top 10 for the year (just the ones that made it to the top 10 for each month, so a game that’s number 11 for all 12 months might actually turn out to be the number one selling game of the year). Luckily, NPD provided the 2008 yearly top 10, and here they are:

NPD 2008: Yearly Top 10

NPD 2008: Yearly Top 10

NPD 2008: Yearly Top 10

NPD 2008: Yearly Top 10

The Wii domination is now fully showing, with the top 4 titles all Wii ones, but unfortunately for third party publishers, they’re all Nintendo titles. The second half of the table is dominated by the Xbox 360, but this time it’s better news for publishers as there’s only one Microsoft title (and that was actually Epic Games’). The poor showing for the PS3 continues, with only a single title in the top 10, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV (previously a PlayStation timed exclusive), a multi-platform release that was outsold by the Xbox 360 version by nearly a 1.7 to 1 margin.

So that’s 2008 in charts and graphs. Nintendo for the Gold, Xbox 360 for the Silver and the PS3 for the Bronze.

 

4 Responses to “Game Consoles – NPD Sales Figures – 2008 Year in Review”

  1. Weekly News Roundup (25 January 2009) « Blog Archive « DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest Says:

    […] DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest Just what the world needs, another blog « Game Consoles – NPD Sales Figures – 2008 Year in Review […]

  2. 2008 Game of the Year Poll - Results « Blog Archive « DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest Says:

    […] start of February, I started a poll on the best game of 2008. Why as late as February? Because the 2008 NPD video game sales analysis was only posted a couple of days earlier, and so with that information, I was able to compile a […]

  3. Game Consoles – December 2009 NPD Sales Figure Analysis | DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest Says:

    […] up in the next week or two, which will go through and summarize the stats for 2009, similar to what I did for 2008 around this time last year. So see you until then. Blog this:Digg […]

  4. Game Consoles – NPD Sales Figures – 2009 Year in Review | DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest Says:

    […] you compare the above graph with the equivalent one for 2008, you can see that overall, the situation is still fairly similar. The Wii domination is still […]


About Digital Digest | Help | Privacy | Submissions | Sitemap

© Copyright 1999-2012 Digital Digest. Duplication of links or content is strictly prohibited.