The Official November 2010 NPD Thread

[postofficebuddy]

Zucas said:

  I guess that leaves us with PS3 and the question of "what happened?"  I mean I think the first thing that comes to people's mind is strong competition.  They were facing two other home systems that were cheaper by a solid $100 and came with added value that PS3 didn't have in November in Black Friday.  Already mentioned on the Wii front that for $200 you got the system and 2 games.  Also some good BF deals that game extra game to that mix or in Best Buy's case, $30 off.  Not to mention Wii had compelling software release consistently in the month with Goldeneye, Sonic, and Donkey Kong.  360 on the other hand also started out at $200, or $300 if you wanted Kinect with a game.  Their holiday bundle also came with 2 games, although one downloadable.  And then of course Kinect coming out in that month gave it its own uniqueness along with titles such as Fable, Halo, and Black Ops.  When you really compare this to PS3, you can see where it didn't stack up competitively.  It's Black Friday deals weren't as strong as 360 or Wii.  You start off at $300 with no games and $400 to start off with Move and a game.  And probably one of the biggest hits to its sales this month came from GT5 not coming out at the planned time.  That was its big exclusive to really give it an edge and it missed the mark.  

  But all and all, software is what seems to be pretty epic too.  I mean seriously 8.4 million for Black Ops.  That is just crazy.  I can't wait to see some leaked individual numbers haha.  

Yeah, basically it comes down to strong competition. And the PS3 numbers are certainly nothing to write home, in fact they're below average to say the least, but they're not really all that far off of our own. The numbers in the OP are just our Americas numbers with a flat calculation of X 0.87 applied to them across the board. Both PS3 and Wii perform better than 360 outside of the USA relative to their USA performance, particularly in the PS3's case since Black Friday seemed to have such a minimal impact on its sales. In reality we're probably only low on PS3 by 25k-50k and Wii probably edged out the 360 for the month. Still both Wii and 360 pulled some truly impressive numbers this month and those Black Ops numbers indeed crazy, especially when you consider the fact that they don't include sales with the 360 bundle or Steam dowloads.