| Shadow1980 said: Since Rol mentioned 2008, I went looking for some numbers and was able to find this:
Granted, it's revenue, not unit sales, but still. The total hardware market was at its peak in 2008, with the Wii, 360, PS3, DS, and PSP all doing quite well. The While the PS4 & XBO are doing well, the Switch is just starting off, and having a small install base and only one truly must-have game will put an upper limit on its launch month software sales potential. Also, the Vita is dead in the U.S. and the 3DS is slowly on the way out and was never even close to being as big as the DS was. That massively shrunken handheld market alone is probably a big reason why software sales have declined so much, to say nothing of how little the Wii U has sold compared to the Wii. Last March we saw console & handheld software generate $465.8M in revenue, up 8% from 2015 but nowhere close to what we saw nine years ago. I was also able to find the March 2008 NPD list for the Top 20 list for best-selling software releases of that month:
Zelda will sell a lot of copies, Horizon is looking to be a huge success, and Mass Effect and Ghost Recon could do well, but the total size of the 8th-gen market almost certaintly isn't enough to drive sales to reach a new record. We'd have to see YoY software sales more than double to pass the $945M we saw in March '08. |
Oh well then, it isn't to be. Hopefully it will still be a strong month generally. Thanks for finding the info
