The Official October NPD Thread (Data at 6:30 PM EST ~3.5 hours)

[Neos]

Overall:

"The video games industry grew an impressive 18% year-over-year in the first month of the critical fourth quarter. With 10-months under its belt, the video games industry is still poised to top $22B in annual sales in 2008."

"The sales results are mixed this month, however. The console portion of the market made significant gains at 26% across hardware, software and accessories, while the portable side of the market stalled, declining 14%. Year-to-date the portable segment of the market is still up 7%."

Hardware:

"The greater supply of Wii hardware at retail is evident in the sales figures for the month with the Wii enjoying its best sales month outside of last November and December."

"The price reduction on the Xbox 360 is paying dividends at retail as the platform realized a 7% unit sales increase over September. Keeping in mind that September was a 5-week month while October had four, the sales pace increased 33%."

"The PS3 realized the greatest year-over-year monthly unit sales increase at 57%."

Software:

"Console software sales realized the greatest percentage gain year-over-year of any category. This month, Fable II captured the top spot selling 790K units across the standard and limited edition SKU's."

"The expanding variety of content available for consumers to play is clearly paying off for the industry. Looking at the top 10 games for the month, half are "M" rated games while the other half are "E" rated games and they span disparate genres. There is something for everyone on this list"

Accessories:

"Accessory sales are down for the month but we should expect this category to pick up again with the anticipated increases in hardware sales for the holidays."