NPD: Nintendo sales down, but so is everything else

Nintendos hardware is down on the month before, but so are the rest of the consoles. Chinatown Wars fails to chart.

It’s all doom and gloom for the game industry this month. Well not really, sure things are down but there are plenty of reasons why and it’s probably not the economy. While this months charts cover 5 months hardware sales have dropped 18% and software is down 17%. NPD Analysts say there are a few reasons for this, for one Easter was missing from this sales period and it didn’t have Super Smash Bros Brawl released in the same period which helped contribute to both the software side of things but also moved a bunch of hardware too. Nintendo DS data is also down too, but this could be attributed people holding back on buying a DS in anticipation of the new model. Also on the DS front Chinatown Wars failed to chart which means it sold less than 205,000 copies. We hope though that like other popular DS games Chinatown Wars will of course be less front loaded then its big console cousins.

Hardware Sales Nintendo Wii – 601K Nintendo DS – 563K Xbox 360 – 330K PlayStation 3 – 218K PSP – 168K PlayStation 2 – 112K

Software Sales Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360) – 938K Pokemon Platinum (Nintendo DS) 805K Halo Wars (Xbox 360) – 639K Resident Evil 5 (Playstation 3) – 585K Wii Fit (Nintendo Wii) – 541K MLB ‘09: The Show (Playstation 3) – 305K Killzone 2 ((Playstation 3) – 296K Wii Play (Nintendo Wii) – 281K Mario Kart Wii (Nintendo Wii) – 278K MLB 2K9 (Xbox 360) – 205K

Source: GoNintendo, Gamedaily