Gamaustra

New graphs released today by the NPD group show Microsoft's Xbox 360 leading Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii in retail sales of online-capable games and retail cards for digital currency.

Without specifying specific sales numbers, the graphs show the Xbox 360 selling roughly twice as many online-capable games as the PS3 in 2010, and roughly seven times as many such games as the Wii for the year.

Online-capable game sales for all three consoles increased sharply from 2006 to 2008, according to the data, before largely leveling off through 2010. NPD did not measure how often such games were actually played online.

Retailers also sold nearly four times as many Xbox 360 digital points cards than PS3 cards in 2010, according to NPD's data, and point card sales for both systems easily outpaced those on the Wii for the year. The data doesn't take into account digital currency purchased directly through the systems themselves.

NPD has also begun separating out sales of software compatible with stereoscopic 3D displays, which represented a full 25 percent of all new retail software sales last November before falling off to a level around 10 percent of total sales this April.

The NPD data also unsurprisingly shows sales for motion-controlled games increasing significantly between April 2010 and April 2011, after the release of the PlayStation Move and Xbox 360 Kinect controllers.

Earlier today, NPD announced a new report showing digital gamers purchasing more games overall than so-called "core gamers."

NPD's graphs are viewable below.

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/35455/NPD_Xbox_360_Leads_In_Game_Card_OnlineCapable_Game_Sales.php

FIrst chart is very impressive!

That's amazing. Funny because I think I spend more money on PSN then Live. Those stupid PSOne classic are killing me.

Well considering how vast the amount of stuff available to download on Xbox Live is I'm not surprised at all. MS continues to be on the forefront of the online space.

Hmm i think i need to look for captain obvious demotivator.

There's 32M of x360 in americas vs 19M PS3

It's way more than 3rd (ish) ahead of it though.

Uh....pretty sure PSN cards weren't sold till late 2008.  How was it on par with the Wii?  Also that graph is pretty useless without defining the Y-axis.

It's not that surprising though, xbox cards seem to go on sale regularly, probably because they aren't defined as a dollar amount.  On PSN (assuming you have a credit card) you might as well just do it directly since you can pay the exact amount (if over $5).  Still don't understand why the Wii was so low considering it probably has the lowest percentage of credit card holders.

I dont want to narrow this achievement but you also remember that you HAVE to buy cards just to play online

so those points dont go full in games, but subscribtion fee

Well this is kind of Obvious. Xbox Live stands where it is because of the obviously large amount of quality online attributes. Sony is known for quality first party software because of god knows how many first party devs Sony owns by now. Nintendo sells the most casual at home titles. These are their strong points. Microsoft owns the online dept.

Not really surprising.
What would be interesting to see is the amount of customers on each platform that purchase game cards because they have no other choice ( personally all my purchases on PSN are done with a credit card...)