Yesterday NPD numbers were released and shortly after it Microsoft released a statement about them (and rightfully so, since they had quite some things to brag about) But one part really caught my attention since it was essentially stating that software sales on 360 and Wii were almost equal when you take Halo 3 out of the equasion, something that seemed pretty contradictionary to the numbers we have seen on this site for the last few months. So I did a few calculations and these are the results:
| 8-sep | 15-sep | 22-sep | 29-sep | 6-okt | Total |
Xbox 360 | 877,143 | 751,610 | 673,578 | 619,601 | 903,903 | 3,825,835 |
Wii | 441,161 | 319,127 | 330,867 | 333,869 | 358,953 | 1,783,977 |
PS3 | 295,701 | 368,484 | 266,037 | 235,110 | 292,806 | 1,458,138 |
This shows VGchartz software totals for the mentioned periods, where Wii numbers have been corrected for Wii Sports and XBox 360 numbers are without Halo 3. I took out Wii Sports since NPD isn't counting them as software sales and I took out Halo 3 because I am interested about sales of other XBox 360 titles, cause we already know how many units Halo 3 sold.
According to Microsoft, september 2007 software numbers showed (on next-gen platform only):
Software revenue:
Xbox 360:Wii = 4:1
Xbox 360:PS3 = 8:1
Xbox360:Wii+PS3 = 3:1
Xbox360 without Halo3:PS3 = 2:1
They also stated total revenue for Halo 3 to be 225M and an average retail price of 69 dollar.
Without Halo 3, Xbox 360 still outsold PS3 2:1, which means that if PS3 accounted for 9% of total revenue than Xbox 360 without Halo 3 accounts for 18%. This gives the following numbers:
| Market-share | Revenue | Average price per unit (scenario 1) | Units sold (scenario 1) | Average price per unit (scenario 2) | Units sold (scenario 2) | Average price per unit (scenario 3) | Units sold (scenario 3) |
Xbox 360 | 74% | $297,321,429 | $67 | 4,466,227 | $63 | 4,707,298 | $59 | 5,068,905 |
Halo 3 | 56% | $225,000,000 | $69 | 3,260,870 | $69 | 3,260,870 | $69 | 3,260,870 |
Xbox 360 without Halo 3 | 18% | $72,321,429 | $60 | 1,205,357 | $50 | 1,446,429 | $40 | 1,808,036 |
Wii | 17% | $68,303,571 | $50 | 1,366,071 | $42 | 1,626,276 | $35 | 1,951,531 |
PS 3 | 9% | $36,160,714 | $60 | 602,679 | $50 | 723,214 | $40 | 904,018 |
Personally I think my scenario 2 is likely to be closest to numbers for real average retail prices. Maybe Xbox 360 and PS3 are somewhere in between scenario 2 and 3, but that still would only put their software sales at around 1.7M for all Xbox 360 titles except Halo 3 and 800k for PS3 titles. Considering VGchartz has Xbox 360 at 3.8M at the moment and PS3 at 1.4M those platforms seem to be overstated by huge amounts all across the board.Wii numbers seem to be a lot closer to NPD numbers for total software sales. Hopefully this information will help ioi to improve his software numbers in the future.
Link: the original Microsoft response can be found here: http://kotaku.com/gaming/npd/npd-numbers-the-microsoft-take-312653.php
