Crunching NPD's numbers: the 360 is a publisher's best bet
Sales numbers are hard to come by when it comes to the gaming industry; there is no public source of information for what games and consoles are selling. The closest thing that the press has is the monthly sales report from the NPD Group. These numbers are important, and every game blog on every corner of the Internet publishes its take on what the numbers mean. Having a game on the top ten sales is big news; your title looks like a success, and suddenly everyone is talking about it. Publishers love a blockbuster, so Ars asks the question: year to date, what consoles are owning the monthly top ten list?
We studied the last ten months of data from NPD and tabulated how many games each console had in the top ten list each month. As of October, here are the totals:
http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/console.png
The trends are obvious. When it comes to the best-selling games month after month, the Wii and the Xbox 360 dominate. Digging a little deeper, however, and you can begin to see why the 360 is so enticing to third-party developers: 25 of the 34 games the Wii put on the list were published by Nintendo itself. Each game also stayed on the charts month after month. Titles like Mario Kart, Wii Play, and Wii Fit were each counted multiple times; Wii Play is rarely off the chart. This is good news for Nintendo, but bad news for everyone else: Nintendo excels at selling Nintendo games and keeping a few games relevant for a long time.
Here is another way of looking at the data, after we've removed Nintendo first-party games and titles that chart multiple times:
http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/top10-2.png
The Xbox 360, by contrast, charts many third-party games each month. Many different games. In almost every case where a multiplatform game was released on multiple consoles, the 360 version hit the charts while the PS3 version was either nowhere to be seen, or sold in far fewer numbers. In August, Madden 2009 sold 1 million units on the Xbox 360, and 643,000 on the PS3. It was a hit on both consoles, but the 360 took the number one slot—and by no small margin.
The PS2 only charted nine games this year, but there is another clear trend: tie-ins, ports, and "event" games do very well. If you look at the games that made it into the top ten list you'll see what I mean. Guitar Hero 2, Transformers, Madden '09, Lego Indiana Jones... all these games were put on every system under the sun and were part of a major franchise. If you have a title with broad appeal, it's worth porting it to the aging PS2.
The DS is just like the Wii in that Nintendo games do very well. The PS3 does fine with the ultra-huge releases, such as EA's sports games and a few exclusives, such as LittleBigPlanet and Metal Gear Solid 4, but publishers have to see what's so clear on the chart: the 360 sells many more games to many more people.
While the fights taking place under the top ten list are largely invisible to the public, it wouldn't be a surprise if these trends continued when looking at the top twenty, or even the top thirty. Sony lacks the ability to chart a wide array of blockbusters, and the publishers know it.
.
