Game Stooge

The Lund Report: September 2011 NPD

• Scribbled on October 14th, 2011 by Jordan Lund
• Filed in Features, Game Genres, NPD, Platforms

The NPD sales for September are in.

Here’s what we know: Microsoft is claiming the top spot for the 9th month in a row with 438,000 units sold. Microsoft is touting it’s more than a 40% share of the market for the seventh month running. Nintendo announced Wii sales of 240,000. Doing the math, 438,000 = 42% plus the Wii sales means that Sony’s unannounced PS3 sales must be around 364,910 putting them in 2nd place. That’s the 5th time this year they’ve pushed the Wii down into 3rd which has to be good news for them.

Sony claims their sales are up 20% over the previous year, but that seems to be mathematically impossible given what we know about Microsoft and Nintendo’s sales for September. They are, however, up a respectable 16.96% over September of 2010, so I don’t know why they’d fudge that up to 20%.

Xbox 360 sales are down 9.5% from 9/2010 and Wii sales are down 5.51%. Overall, year to date sales for the 360 Jan to Sep are up 7.39% over 2010 and the PS3 is up 2.35%. The Wii is down a whopping 26.27%.

We can’t accurately judge the numbers for the DS, 3DS or PSP because of a lack of reporting over the past several months. The price cut seems to have seriously boosted 3DS sales kicking it up to 260,000 for September, a 25K jump over August when the price cut was announced. We have no numbers for July.

On the software side:

• 01. Madden NFL 12 (360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP)** Electronic Arts
• 02. Gears of War 3 (360)** Microsoft (Corp)
• 03. Dead Island (360, PS3, PC) Deep Silver
• 04. FIFA Soccer 12 (360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP, 3DS) Electronic Arts
• 05. NHL 12 (360, PS3) Electronic Arts
• 06. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (360, PS3, PC)** Square Enix Inc
• 07. Resistance 3 (PS3) Sony (Corp)
• 08. Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (Wii, NDS, 360, 3DS, PS3, PSP, PC) LucasArts
• 09. Call of Duty: Black Ops (360, PS3, NDS, Wii, PC)** Activision Blizzard
• 10. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (360, PS3, PC) THQ

I’m somewhat surprised at Madden taking the top spot, but considering it’s cumulative sales across 5 platforms I really shouldn’t be. Gears of War 3 takes the #2 spot, despite only being on one console. Those sales don’t count the limited edition Gears 3 consoles either. Despite having a reputation for being buggy on the PC and PS3, Dead Island takes the #3 spot, it will be interesting to see if that holds in the face of bad to indifferent word of mouth.

Deus Ex continues to hold on, this time at #6 on the list. Resistance: Fall of Man 3 enters the list at #07, which is more or less in keeping with the first two games, the first of which failed to chart at all and the second ranked #9 in it’s first month of sales.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is another surprise, considering how derided the “Space Marine” cliche is among gamers. This month saw the release of TWO fat space marine games and both did well enough to place in the top 10.

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