January-NPD
Latest
January NPD: PS4 leads hardware, Xbox platforms sell most games
The NPD Group's numbers for January are in and survey says: PS4 is on top in overall hardware sales, with the Xbox One right behind. Microsoft's take on the numbers focuses on games, saying the Xbox led "US game sales" in January. Combining all Xbox platforms, Microsoft states it made up for 47 percent of the month's software market share, based on data provided by the NPD Group. Xbox Corporate VP of Marketing, Strategy and Business, Yusuf Mehdi, also revealed that over 685 million speech commands have been used to navigate Xbox One, "including 20 million commands of 'Xbox, Record That' alone." Yup, they're counting. In a statement obtained by VentureBeat, demand for the PS4 remains high as it retained the number one spot, "nearly doubling the nearest next-gen competitor," said Sony spokesperson Guy Longworth. Nintendo software saw a slight bump, with 3DS up 6 percent and Wii U up 26 percent (both numbers normalized). Call of Duty: Ghosts led the month in sales with NBA 2K14 and Battlefield 4 behind them. Top ten new, physical retail sales can be found after the break.
Xbox 360 sold 281K units in January
At least 281,000 people became the brand new owners of an Xbox 360 during the month of January, Microsoft has announced. This feat, as we mentioned yesterday, marks January as the twenty-fifth consecutive month in which the 360 has been the best-selling console in the United States, as well as its eighteenth month as the best-selling piece of gaming hardware in general.When asked for comment, our Xbox sat there and whirled its disc drive at us, because it's an Xbox, and we don't know what we were expecting.
January NPD: Black Ops 2 tops, DmC: Devil May Cry debuts in sixth place
Black Ops 2, Far Cry 3 and Just Dance 4 were January's best-selling games, according to NPD sales data, with Capcom's rebooted DmC: Devil May Cry sliding in at sixth place. As per usual, the full list of the month's top 10 best-selling games can be found after the break.During the five-week period running from December 30, 2012, through February 2, 2013, the combined might of the video game sales industry's physical retail channels earned a total of $834.7 million, a nine percent year-over-year increase as compared with January 2011's performance. This is the first time the industry has reported an annualized overall increase in sales in at least twelve months.2013's "January" is five weeks, as opposed to the traditional four, for calculation purposes. The NPD Group makes this adjustment once every six or seven years to combat data drift in its reporting, much in the same way our calendar system implements a Leap Day to correct for discrepancies between the number of days in the year, and the length of Earth's orbit.Therefore, January's year-over-year increase is actually the direct result of the extended recording period. If January's overall results are "corrected" for the additional time, the industry's physical retail performance is actually down by 13 percent, rather than up by nine. Regardless, hardware sales in general were responsible for $205 million of the period's total invoice, up four percent since last year without corrections and down 17 percent with.Once again, the Xbox 360 was the best-selling piece of overall hardware, as it has been for the last 18 months. January was also the console's twenty-fifth month as the leading console.Accessories sales saw the largest development in sales, increasing by 30 percent pre-corrections and four percent post – $256.6 million in January of this year versus $198.1 million last year. Meanwhile, Software sales saw the smallest pre-correction annualized jump with $373.1 million for the period, which is just one percent above the segment's earnings in 2011. After corrections, that difference drops to a 19 percent year-over-year loss.
