Take a look at March sales:

1. Wii - 721k, 144k/wk
2. DS - 698k, 140/wk
3. PSP - 297k, 59k/wk
4. X360 - 262k, 52k/wk
5. PS3 - 257k, 51k/wk
6. PS2 - 216k, 43k/wk

Now April:

1. Wii - 714k, 178k/wk (+24%)
2. DS - 415k, 104k/wk (-26%)
3. PSP - 193k, 48k/wk (-19%)
4. X360 - 188k, 47k/wk (-10%)
5. PS3 - 187k, 47k/wk (-8%)
6. PS2 - 124k, 31k/wk (-28%)

Notice that the DS, PSP and PS2 suffered huge declines? The PS3/360 sales declines are much less than the weekly declines of the DS/PSP/PS2. That means the PS3/360 outperformed them for April by a fairly significant margin.

What would cause this outperformance of the DS/PSP/PS2? It has to be GTAIV, so yes indeed sales were improved over what could have been an otherwise dreadful month.

You realize this just makes things rougher for PS360 fans. There actually WAS a bump for the systems, and they still failed to reach 200K?

It would be nice to see January-February-March-April sales for many consoles and many years... I expect that things generally slowly ramp down month-to-month over that entire period, and maybe even basically until August, when things start ramping up again.

Wow, I missed the NPD news release so this is the first I'm seeing of it.

Total Wii rapage of the HD systems despite GTAIV - damn.

I don't think people will view this too objectively. For Sony/MS fanboys this is just too bitter a pill to shallow.

But your conclusions are sound Fishyjoe it's just.... damn.

John Lucas missed calling this one. lol.

I guess we wait till June to see if anyone is holding out for the MGS bundle. If PS3 sales don't skyrocket in June, then is spells trouble for Sony.

I think the 360 is already in trouble.

So are numbers going to be chance, because ioi sometimes does, but sometimes doesn't. Has he said what he is going to do this time?

Thanks for the stats FishyJoe... honestly I didn't think of the numbers in such a way, though the way you present them it seems quite a logical conclusion.

But still... it's a damn bitter pill indeed.

Now do we blame a recession or Wii Fit?

This analysis was not to compare VGC with NPD in any way, nor any kind of endorsement for either.

It was merely to show that April's result compared to March is reasonable.

Any reason why there were such huge hw declines in April? Is it because April is a relatively slow month? I noticed a similar drop in hardware sales in April 2007.
360 PS3 Wii
Mar/2007 | 199,000 | 130,000 | 259,000
Apr/2007 | 174,000 | 82,000 | 360,000

 edit: Scratch that. Forgot about March's 5 weeks. 360/Wii weekly average increased and PS3's dropped. So, that kinda rules out April being a slow month. 

Sure, excluding Wii (increased supply) April was lower than March barring the GTA IV week. MS claimed a 54% increase that week, which is only around 20k.

I guess it's possible the bump will last into May and therefore the first few weeks of May will be higher than the first few weeks in April for PS360. Of course there won't be a bump in the last week of May, but sales probably won't be that much lower in May.

A lot of people on here just pick and choose whichever data suits them best and question the data they don't like, pretty tiresome really.

Nice analysis. The small drop instead of a huge drop turned out to be a tiny success.