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Game Consoles Sell Over 3.2 Million Units in November

Posted by Zonk on Wed Dec 06, 2006 05:21 PM
from the that's-a-spicy-meatball dept.
The Almighty Buck Entertainment Games
Ground Glass writes "While there wasn't any question that November was going to be a huge month for gaming (what with those two consoles coming out and all), it's still impressive to see the numbers. In short, Nintendo's DS was the big winner with over 600,000 units sold, though the Wii and Xbox 360 also each broke half a million. The PS3 probably came in at around 200K all told for the month. Convert those numbers into dollars and you're looking at one very fat and happy industry." From the Next Generation article: "In its monthly report analyst Arcadia Investment says console sales in November topped 3.2 million units. Arcadia says hardware sales increased by at least 50% year on year, with software up about 20%. Retail dollars increased by about 25-30% to about $1.6 billion, compared to $1.3 billion in November 2005. "
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[+] NPD Reports November Console Sales 82 comments
CBackSlash writes "Joystiq has a summary of the NPD console sales numbers for November 2006. The big headline is that the industry overall was up 34 percent to $1.7 billion. But the smaller headlines are probably more interesting for us: PS3 only shipped 197k, while the XBox 360 had 511k, and the Wii had a very respectable 476k. However, all of the new consoles were outsold by the lowly PS2 (664k) and DS Lite(641k)." These are a more detailed set of numbers than those we discussed on Wednesday.
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Game Consoles Sell Over 3.2 Million Units in November 50 Comments More /

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  • DS + Wii vs. PSP + PS3 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by seebs (15766) on Wednesday December 06 2006, @05:30PM (#17137908) Homepage
    Remember when Nintendo had a game machine that was low-powered, but had an innovative control scheme many initially derided as gimmicky, and it was in direct competition with a higher-powered, much more expensive, Sony product which could play movies in a new and effectively proprietary format?

    Apparently, it wasn't a bad plan.
      • As the AC pointed out, both the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube were far more powerful (in terms of CPU, memory, and Graphics capability) that their Sony competitors.

        While it is frequently bandied about that the Wii is only as powerful as the original Xbox, this isn't true either. The Gamecube itself was as powerful (in terms of CPU and grpahics capability, although it did have slightly less RAM, the performance of both was about the same) as the original Xbox. In reality, I think its pretty clear that b

          • lots of gamers that have gamecube say new Wii games are actually not better graphically than latest Gamecube games.

            Same could be said about early 360 games which also where not much better than original games. The only reason PS3 games look so good is because the PS2 is the oldest and slowest of the bunch. That being said, its also going to be a long time before anything looks better than the less powerful 360, as developers loath working on the Cell.

            As it was many feel that people didnt get enough ou

              • Same could be said about early 360 games which also where not much better than original games.
                Ok, this isn't even remotely true.

                Yes, it is. He said "early." While there were some nice looking "launch window" titles, lots looked like high-res PS2 games. Look at shit like Tony Hawk's or Gun.

          • Yes, cross-platform games often look worse on the Cube than on the Xbox. That's due to bad ports, not due to the Cube - your PS2 comparison should have told you that. Look at games made specifically for the Cube. Compare the best-looking Cube games to the best-looking Xbox games, and then tell me the Xbox is significantly faster than the Cube. The Cube has games like Resident Evil 4 or Metroid Prime. The Xbox has some nice looking games, too, but nothing that really outshines the Cube's offerings.

  • Ranked in terms of consoles sold last month: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by paladinwannabe2 (889776) on Wednesday December 06 2006, @05:39PM (#17138058)
    (Numbers are approximate, they didn't have exact numbers in the article)
    DS (600K+) > XBox360 (500K++) > PS2 (500K+) > Wii (500K) > PSP (350K) > PS3 (~200K)


    It looks like the PS2 and the Xbox 360 are both outselling the new consoles- which is surprising to me. Still, it seems Nintendo is the big winner, since they are selling an average of two games per Wii on top of actually selling a console for a profit. Microsoft seems to be doing a lot better with their 360 sales than I expected they would- I guess people decided getting a Wii or PS3 wasn't worth the effort when there was an good console readily available.

    • Re:Ranked in terms of consoles sold last month: (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AuMatar (183847) on Wednesday December 06 2006, @05:48PM (#17138220)
      The Wii and PS3 are hampered by availability. Although if I were Sony, the high volume of PS2 would scare me- all the PS3 brings to the table is more power. If people are still buying the PS2, then power won't be enough. It puts the Wii in a real spot to win this round, as they aren't counting on the processing power to win.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DrXym (126579)
        If I were Sony I wouldn't be worred about PS2 sales. Every sale means profit and more potential converts to the PS3. Maybe not today but in a few years from now. Perhaps they even see the PS2 as a good way to stay in a holding pattern until the price of the PS3 becomes more reasonable.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by AuMatar (183847)
          With consoles, you don't have time. If people don't buy your console now, then developers won't target it (they'll target the Wii, 360, or PS2). If devs don't target it, it won't sell in the future either. Getting a large install base early is an absolute necessity, or you won't have one late.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by be-fan (61476)
        Why should the high volumes of the PS2 scare Sony? It's exactly what happened with the PS1 when the PS2 came out. Sony overlaps their consoles in order to compensate for the fact that they initially take a loss on new ones. The PS2 has a good year in it making Sony money while the PS3 ramps up, while the GC and Xbox are quite dead by now (with TP being the GC's last hurrah).

        And you say "processing power" as if it doesn't matter. The SNES was just an NES with more processing power. The PS2 was just a PS1 wit
        • Truthfully, more processing power matters less and less as the power of the older one increases. The SNES->NES was a big increase only because the original NES was so weak. The increase from SNES->N64/PS generation was much smaller, if that hadn't been the time all games went 3D it would have been barely noticed. The difference in games from PS->PS2 wasn't noticable. Now? The difference doesn't add anything. The only reason to upgrade is because developers will stop targeting the old platform

          • Re:Ranked in terms of consoles sold last month: (Score:4, Insightful)

            by be-fan (61476) on Wednesday December 06 2006, @11:51PM (#17141824)
            Bullshit. Dvorak was spouting off in the mid 1990s about how nobody would ever need anything more than a 200 MHz Pentium. It wasn't true then, it's not true now.

            The NES to SNES upgrade was actually relatively minor. You got more colors and bigger sprites, but the CPU was still weak, so the games were the same, but prettier. The SNES -> N64 transition was huge. It was the first console that could do 3D properly. Mario 64 changed platformers completely, and would not have been possible on any previous console. FPS as a genre wasn't really feasible until then either. The PS2 was the first console that had the horsepower to have complex environments, because the N64 and PS could not push enough polygons to do more than very simplistic environments.

            This generation is potentially as interesting as the N64 one. The new consoles have an order of magnitude more power than the previous gen, and more importantly, they have a lot of power that's independent of the graphics pipeline. Wheras the main CPU in the PS2 spends much of its time crunching geometry to feed the rasterizer, the geometry processor in the RSX frees the Cell in the PS3 from much of that. Wheras previous consoles had to squeeze in AI and physics into a small slice of time between handling graphics code, the current batch can spend a lot of main CPU time on those things.

            Gears of War is really a prime example. Even if you toned down the graphics, such a game could not be done on previous-gen systems. They don't have the horsepower to do either the physics, nor the level complexity (battlefields strewn with junk that serves as cover).
            • FPS as a genre wasn't really feasible on a console until then either.
              fixed it for ya :)
              • It depends on what you mean by "FPS". You can count Doom and Duke Nukem as FPSs, but the SNES was capable of running those too. I consider Quake to be the first true FPS, in that its the first one to give you a real first person view (you can look around). The N64 was released the day after Quake. Also, th efirst PC graphics board capable of running Quake properly (the Voodoo 1) wasn't released until four months later.
                • Actually the first Quake like fps was Ultima underworld and that one already had full physics, multiple levels etc... bridges gaps etc... and full environmental interaction, and ghasp it came out months before castle wolfenstein 3d. Just to show how advanced the Looking Glass games really were :-)

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by jackbird (721605)
              The PS2 was the first console that had the horsepower to have complex environments, because the N64 and PS could not push enough polygons to do more than very simplistic environments.

              *cough*Dreamcast*cough*

              • Exactly!

                Long live the Dreamcast. I mean, a modem and web browser too! One of my favorite systems ever.

        • The SNES was just an NES with more processing power.

          First console to incorporate scanline rotation and scaling in hardware (Mode 7), allowing for much more realistic racing games (compare F-Zero to Rad Racer 2). First console controller to incorporate dual cross keys and shoulder buttons. The plain old "more CPU" console upgrade was Sega Master System -> Genesis.

          • Congrats. You mentioned the single game that took advantage of Mode 7 and actually made it work. ;) The Snes allowed bigger games and decent console ports. It was still the same old, same old.

      • The Wii and PS3 are hampered by availability. Although if I were Sony, the high volume of PS2 would scare me- all the PS3 brings to the table is more power.

        At the risk of being labeled a fanboy, this is 100% false. Over the Ps2, the Ps3 brings multiplayer capability out of the box (at least 4 players vs. 2 on the Ps2), Wireless control standard on all gamepads, MUCH better online infrastructure, The Ability to play Blu-Ray movies (a BIG plus if you have a high def tv), Downloadable classic games for 6 buc

    • Well, the Xbox 360 was out for the entire month of November and widely available. The Wii and PS3 were available for part of the month and were in high demand...

      With the negative opinions of the PS3 and the increase in HDTV uptake, it's not too entirely surprising.
    • That the PS2 still sells is not surprising at all - it costs only $125 or so, IIRC, and has a library, and with new titles still coming out.

      The new systems won't be fully entrenched for at least 2 years.
  • Of the big 3, generally only Nintendo actually makes a profit off their gaming systems in the first year of release.

    By some estimates Sony is subsidizing the PS3 to the tune of $300/unit while Microsoft is probably just about breaking even on systems. The big money for Microsoft and Sony comes from game sales, and the only solid numbers I've seen in that category were for Zelda units for the Wii (400k+).

    So on the money side Nintendo has made a hefty profit from their 1.1 million+ units sold, Microsoft, hav
    • You must not follow the news. http://www.isuppli.com/news/default.asp?id=6919 [isuppli.com] I suspect MS isn't getting the whole $75, they are probably taking $50 and leaving retailers with $25 per unit, so that they have more incentive to push 360 sales.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by aricept (810752)
          Not to say that the numbers are not incorrect, but the number listed for "Motherboard" on the side by side comparison includes everything ON the MB - CPU, GPU, memory; you can tally the numbers from the first list of individual parts.
        • Using that formula, then absolutely no console will make any money at all period. Because the $100 per console made per WII for the first year will not make up for it's development costs either. Unless you are thinking that the first WII, PS3, Xbox360 will be sold for multi-millions and the rest is pure profit it's got to be that way.

          So when people say that MS & Nintendo are making a profit on each device at this time, it means that they aren't being sold for a loss. None of them have paid off their

          • Because the $100 per console made per WII for the first year will not make up for it's development costs either.

            Few manufactured items, in particular innovative ones are profitable in their first year by those standards. Accountants have a neat trick called amortization, which can assume that initial costs are considered over the expected lifetime of the item. Also, I don't know where you are getting your numbers from, but I'd be very surprised if any manufacturer every made $100 each on anything selling for a retail price of $250 per unit.

            • The $100 number isn't supposed to be anything even remotely close to reality, it being overly high was meant to try and show that even if Nintendo were to be able to make a very improbable $100 per $250 console, that they wouldn't be able to recoupe their development, R/D, etc costs within any short period of time.
      • The difference is a recurring cost versus a nonrecurring cost. If your profit per unit is higher than your per item, you want to sell as many as possible even if you've sunk a lot into NRE. But I thought that it was said that Microsoft was selling the xbox for lower than the per item cost.
      • With Nintendo, you pay $250 to get $200 worth of machine
        With Sony, you pay $600 to get $1000 worth of machine
        With Microsoft, you pay $400 to get $700 worth of machine

        With Nintendo, you pay $250 on a $200 machine and Nintendo invests $300 into game development
        With Sony, you pay $600 to get a $900 machine
        With Microsoft, you pay $400 to get a $700 machine

        Being that I could care less about Blu-Ray and am only buying this for games I wonder which I should buy ... I can buy one machine for $250 which has the high
      • Let me explain something to you.
        PS-3
        What good is a $1000 machine that doesn't play any games that you want even if it only costs $600? So far I have heard of one good game of the PS-3 and that is nothing but YAFPS. Your buying it for the future? Why not wait until more games come out and see if it is really worth it. Guess what it isn't going to go up in price.
        Blue-ray? I really don't care since none of the movies I really want to see are on Blue-Ray yet and unless their is a massive shake out it looks as
  • Could have been 3.2M + 1, but there are no Wii's to be found here, the store had 20 units the first day, and sold out since.

    Sony keeps heavy advertising about the PS3, but what good does it do if they get me interested in it, all to have me go down to the store to look at an empty shelf... It's having the opposite effect, more of a turn off than getting me to want one at this point.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by HappySqurriel (1010623)
      A long time ago (probably a few years ago anyways) I was talking to someone in marketing about how most car comercials were awful and didn't make me want to spend $25,000+ and her reply was "Most comercials are not about attracting customers but are actually about making existing customers secure in their decision"

      The fact is that there are so many PS3 comercials because Sony wants to make the fanboys think that the $600 they spent makes them own a cool product.

      • The fact is that there are so many PS3 comercials because Sony wants to make the fanboys think that the $600 they spent makes them own a cool product.
        The difference between the $25,000 car and the PS3 is that Sony actually NEEDS a lot of sales for the PS3, where the car company only needs to sell a (relative to the PS3) few $25,000 cars.

        Making fanboys feel good about spending too much money does Sony little good. They actually need to convince millions of people to buy PS3s (and actually wait until there's
        • From my very limited understanding the most effective way to sell something is to give someone first hand experience with it, followed by word of mouth, followed by recomendation from a trusted 'neutral' resource, followed by good research materials (mostly web-based now a days), and then finally active marketing. People tune out comercials unless they are highly interested in the product.

          I suspect that why companies want people who have bought their product to feel secure about their purchase is that they

  • Well, at least Nintendo is happy ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Frag-A-Muffin (5490) on Wednesday December 06 2006, @06:40PM (#17138968) Homepage
    "Convert those numbers into dollars and you're looking at one very fat and happy industry."

    The only people we know for sure that's happy about all those consoles being moved is Nintendo.

    *(1) Although, if you take console sales as an indirect indicator of software sales, then yes, the other guys would be happy too. More on this later

    What we do know is this:

    * Nintendo makes money on the Wii, right out of the gate.
    * Nintendo makes money on each DS Lite sold.
    * Sony's PS3 is losing $200-$300US (we don't exactly how much they're losing, but most analysts say about that range)
    * Sony's PS2 hardware is profitable now.
    * Microsoft was losing money on the Xbox360 at launch, but they've been working hard to reduce the cost to produce the 360, so it may be breaking even at this point. Only Microsoft knows.

    So, Nintendo is certainly happy, Sony is happy PS2 still rakes it in but doesn't make up for PS3's enourmous costs, and Microsoft is happy to just be in the fight :)

    *(1) Consoles moved means more software sales, which is where Microsoft and Sony plan to make their money back. (Nintendo makes money from selling ANYTHING with Nintendo on it, so we know they'll make money on software. They arguably make the most on software than any other single console game producer) Seems the internet believes Microsoft is enjoying a good software sales rate for their xbox360, they won't say of course. Meanwhile, Sony is just mum. Why? well, doesn't seem the attach rate for the PS3 is doing so hot in the US [ign.com] or Japan [joystiq.com]. So Sony's still far away from making money on their new system.

    My point? The industry may or may not be happy, we don't know for sure, but we do know, Nintendo is happy with these numbers :)

    PS WTF's with the 0.98 attach rate for PS3 in Japan?! That's amazing to me. I know lots of people are flipping these on ebay, but even in the land of the rising sun, people aren't buying it to play games. That's bad news. Japan's a huge Sony supporter. If they lose Japan, they're in trouble.

    • Actually given nintendos first party sales numbers, I think their biggest cash cow is the software, but they act more wisely that they want to earn on the hardware as well, they cannot run into financial problems that way. This is one of the reasons why they usually are more on the conservative side regarding the hardware used. They probably earned more on the cube and its games than Sony did on the PS2 regardless of being the last in the sheer numbers, but the cube situation wont repeat itself with the Wii
    • Other than just taking Regi (?)'s word for it - where is the evidence that N is making money on the sales of the console?
      • Handy. =) Change the numbers a bit and you've got an estimation of how much profit / loss there was too.
      • Erm. 125,000,000 + 77,400,000 = 202,400,000.

        You also forgot gba = 500k * 69 = 34,500,000.

        That brings us to 236,900,000, which I'm pretty sure is bigger than 200,000,000.

        Would seem Nintendo is the winner here, no?
          • I've seen it said many times but people really need to quit assuming that the PS2 may be eating away at PS3 profits. The PS3 is sold out everywhere that I've heard save for a few stories about there being some sitting on some random shelves. That's fine. But the PS2 isn't eating any sales, for now. It may eat future sales, but that remains to be seen. We'll only actually know that if, say 6 months to a year in the future there is still strong PS2 sales, and lackluster PS3 sales. Like if there were alw

          • Surprising, huh? Of course, the ps2 sales may be cannibalizing possible ps3 sales.

            No way in hell. The ps2 has been out for 6 years already and runs only $125. Anyone who HASNT already bought one by now isn't really in the market for a $499 Ps3. The people buying PS2's now are primarily late adopters, curious Xbox and Gamecube owners looking to check out the PS2 game library (guitar hero is making lots of converts), and those buying second consoles and/or replacements for old and broken units. Not exactly

  • Uh... convert to dollars? (Score:3, Informative)

    by 2nd Post! (213333) <gundbear@p[ ]ell.net ['acb' in gap]> on Wednesday December 06 2006, @07:16PM (#17139478) Homepage
    If you convert to dollars that is $2m for Nintendo, $40m loss for Sony, and $5m loss for Microsoft.
  • Perhaps you'll want to visit the site http://nexgenwars.com/ [nexgenwars.com] to get a daily update on console sales.
  • As with all EU countries, we have to wait until April 2007 for a PS3, missing the lucrative Christmas season. I don't suppose Sony sees this as a problem - it could easily sell its entire output of consoles elsewhere - but it means a lot of people will be picking up a 360 or Wii instead.

    That's lost customers, and the chances of them coming back to Sony are slim. Of the Sony fanboys I've spoken to, most are incredibly blunt about how badly Sony treats EU countries with hardware releases; a year wait for the

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by HappySqurriel (1010623)
      I don't think Nintendo ever claimed that there was going to be 1,000,000 systems on launch day; I think there were a lot of rumors and speculation that if Nintendo was trying for 2,000,000 by January 1st that 1,000,000 of those would apear on the first day.

      From what I understand Nintendo Shipped about 400,000 to 500,000 on day one with 200,000 to 250,000 every week following that; I have also heard that NPD's sales numbers for november end on November 26th so it is possible that they're missing 4 days of sa
    • No, they're flying off them. I work in retail, my store got 20 in @ launch (I was #12:D ) and have recieved about 10 a week since then, which would sell out by the end of that morning. We also get about 10/1 calls asking about the wii vs ps3.

    • Channel Stuffing (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Boogaroo (604901) on Wednesday December 06 2006, @10:21PM (#17141132) Homepage
      So it looks like Microsoft is trying to flood the retail stores in an attempt to be able to claim some shipped console number near 10 million. Can't be a smart move since there are going to be piles of 360s sitting around for the next few months and they are going to have to undership next quarter and any little benefit they get from claiming higher shipment numbers now will be offset with the reciprocal low shipment news next quarter.

      There's a dirty little trick there that Sony's used before. What you do is recall the overshipment, and then re-ship to places that need it. You get to count those consoles as shipped twice. Nice isn't it?
      • That's why I very much dislike both Microsoft and Sony when it comes to reporting their console numbers. Even assuming all 100 million PS2s last generation were only shipped once, there could be 20 million PS2s that haven't been bought. As you pointed out, there are any number of underhanded ways to bloat the number.

        Nintendo's somewhat more honest, stating actual sales instead of shipped.

        Even looking at sales we can't really get a good idea what the market share actually was. How many sold Xboxs and PS2s we

    • Uhm, the development costs are already accounted for. Nintendo paid them. It was in their past reports. The Wii isn't yet profitable as a project, but it is profitable in that it helps Nintendo make a profit at the end of the next quarter. Every Wii sold makes Nintendo money. Every PS3 sold makes Sony lose money.

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