Nintendo Wii sales plummet by 31.5 percent from January 2010
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Nintendo, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360,
January has just not been a pleasant month for video game sales. At least, that's according to new numbers released by NPD. Total January 2011 sales for gaming accessories, portable systems, and games for PCs and consoles fell to $1.16 billion from last year's total of $1.22 billion. And the $1.22 billion figure for January 2010 is itself a decrease from January 2009 figures, or $1.33 billion in total sales.
Breaking that number out a bit, hardware sales took the biggest year-to-year hit, dropping 8 percent from $353.7 million in January 2010 to $324 million in January 2011. NPD no longer splits this number out into publicly available data for the various console manufacturers; however, Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter said that Microsoft was the only big player to experience year-to-year growth on hardware sales.
According to Pachter, Microsoft sold approximately 332,800 Xbox 360 units, representing a year-to-year growth of 14.4 percent for the company. More than half of the systems sold were also bundled with Microsoft's Kinect accessory.
Nintendo, on the other hand, found its sales down 31.5 percent compared to the same period of time last year. That's a drop from 465,800 Wii consoles sold in January 2010 to 319,000 sold in January 2011. The company still leads the current console market with 34.5 million Wii units sold in the U.S., in total, with Microsoft's Xbox 360 coming in second place at 25.8 million, followed by Sony's PlayStation 3 at 15.7 million.
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PlayStation Move engineer slams Kinect Star Wars
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: Casual, Microsoft, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360,
One of the software engineers for Sony’s PlayStation Move, Anton Mikhailov, soke with EuroGamer on the topic of Kinect’s upcoming Star Wars game. "There's no way Kinect can do a good light saber game. Just never,” said Mikhailov.
Mikhailov then went on to brag about how a Move-compatible Star Wars game would be “damn better than Kinect’s,” even though no such game for Move has been announced.
“Technologically it's 100 per cent feasible,” continued Mikhailov on the subject of a Move Star Wars game. "We can overlay objects over the controller in AR. You've seen that in Start the Party, and swords are a really popular one. The fidelity is certainly there to do all sorts of Star Wars kid-style action. You can very well do the light saber."
As if comparing a game in development to a theoretical game wasn’t bold enough, Mikhailov then questioned the integrity of the Kinect Star Wars demo: "I've seen the demo but it's so scripted, and wasn't it like, faked?”
Kinect’s outspoken guru Kudo Tsunoda was reportedly last seen lobbying Nintendo for the right to make the Move-Kinect rivalry “on like Donkey Kong”.
Read More | Eurogamer
Gallery: PlayStation Move engineer slams Kinect Star Wars
Microsoft sells a million Kinect units in ten days
Posted by John Kilhefner Categories: Microsoft, Xbox 360,
Microsoft's original lofty claim to sell five million Kinect systems before the year's end isn't looking so far fetched after just ten days. Since its release Kinect has found it's way into the homes of a million happy (and possibly not so happy) customers. As of now, the Playstation Move is somewhere around the 3 million mark worldwide. However, Move was released over a month before Kinect, and those figures represent units shipped, not sold.
We'll have to wait until the holidays are over to find out whose winning the motion control war. But with Kinect's insane amount of funding and mainstream infiltration, PS Move may just have to move (see what I did there?) out of the way. And let's not forget that there's still a little console called the Wii that we've forgotten in all the hype and hoopla. Hit the jump for Microsoft's obligatory braggadocios press release.
Click to continue reading Microsoft sells a million Kinect units in ten days
Gallery: Microsoft sells a million Kinect units in ten days
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