Wii helps the videogame industry rise above economic slump. Image: Clownfish/Flickr.
The world may well be teetering on the brink of economic recession, but new U.S. performance figures for the month of October have shown that the videogame industry is enjoying considerable growth.
According to market researcher NPD Group, Japanese gaming giant Nintendo led the hardware industry in October after selling more than 803,210 units of its hugely popular Wii home console, which is a sizeable jump from the 687,000 it sold in September.
Sparked by the approaching holiday season, the market boost also saw Microsoft shifting 371,000 units of its Xbox 360 in October, which marks a modest increase over the 347,200 units it shifted the month before.
It is also worth noting that Redmond-based Microsoft introduced a price cut to its base console in September, which resulted in making it this generation's cheapest home games machine and likely contributed to the resulting sales push.
"We feel cautiously optimistic (going into the holidays)," commented Microsoft spokesman David Dennis in a Reuters report. "We don't see anything in this (NPD) data that leads us to believe there's a pullback."
Dennis also attributed Microsoft's increased performance to recently released software epics Fable II and Fallout 3, which came in as the first and third best-selling games for the month. The Microsoft spokesman also said performance is expected to be strong for December after having already sold more than two million copies of Gears of War 2.
Sadly, while Nintendo and Microsoft posted October improvements for their current home consoles, Sony Corp. failed to continue the trend with its PlayStation 3 after the expensive powerhouse platform only managed to shift 190,000 units, which is a month-on-month drop of 42,400 units.
All told, NPD claims the videogame industry will shift more than $22 billion USD for 2008 once sales of hardware, software and accessories are tallied. In terms of monthly turnover, the industry pulled in $1.35 billion USD in October.
However, while the industry would appear to be in good shape on the home console, software and accessories front, both Sony and Nintendo have seen a 14 percent decline for the handheld market in October.
Specifically, the PlayStation Portable shifted 193,000 units in October compared to 238,100 in September, while the market-leading DS dropped to 491,000 from 536,800.
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