The NPD report recently said that July hardware sales were up, but software sales were down year over year. While software and hardware sales were both up for the PS3 and Xbox 360, hardware sales were flat for the Wii and software was down over $40 million. Wedbush Morgan Securities’ Michael Pachter noted that slowing Wii sales are having a long-term drag on the gaming industry in 2010.
“Xbox 360 software sales benefited from the dramatic hardware sales increases from discounted models and the new slim Xbox 360, while the Wii appears to be suffering from console saturation and fatigue despite the recent launch of the Wii SportsResort/Wii Motion Plus bundle,” said Pachter. “PS3 sales continued to show solid year-over-year growth in both hardware and software.”
“Higher hardware sales should result in growth in software sales, and that has certainly been the case for the PS3 and the Xbox 360,” he continued. “Unfortunately, Wii software sales were down significantly in July, driving overall software sales into negative territory… It is easy to say that the decline in Wii software is due to a lackluster lineup of games; we think that is largely true, but note that the PS3 and Xbox 360 lineups were also relatively light. Year-to-date, Wii hardware sales total 2.7 million, compared to 1.8 million PS3s and 2.4 million Xbox 360s, so it is difficult to blame the year-over-year Wii software sales decline on poor hardware sales. Instead, we think it is becoming apparent that the average Wii owner is just buying less software than his PS3 and Xbox 360 counterparts.”
“The launches of Sony’s Move (in October) and Microsoft’s Kinect (in November) are likely to spur console sales, particularly as bundles are rolled out. Nintendo appears to us to be the odd man out, chugging along with the same hardware model it introduced in 2006 (albeit a different color), while Microsoft and Sony have substantially upgraded their core console models,” he concluded.
Source: IndustryGamers.com {link no longer active}
