The recent United States sales figures for August 2013 from the NPD Group have been revealed. Lo and behold, the Nintendo 3DS managed to outsell the Xbox 360. Though concrete numbers are still pending, Microsoft did reveal that the console sold 96,000 units in August, with total revenue from the platform totaling $213 million, apparently the most for any platform in the US.
However, US hardware sales were down by 40 percent year over year to $90.8 million. Total industry sales were $521 million with a 1 percent rise, although this reflects about half of what the total market spent on games. NPD Group analyst Liam Callahan stated that “We hope to see hardware sales improve with the launch of the Xbox One and PS4 in November.
“These sales figures represent new physical retail sales of hardware, software, and accessories, which account for roughly 50 percent of the total consumer spend on games. When taking into account our preliminary estimate for other physical format sales in August such as used and rentals at $178 million, and our estimate for digital format sales including full game and add-on content downloads including micro-transactions, subscriptions, mobile apps, and the consumer spend on social network games at $528 million, the total consumer spend in August is just over $1.2 billion.”
We expect the new few months to see significant rises for the industry given the propensity of high profile releases, starting with Grand Theft Auto V releasing on September 17th for Xbox 360 and PS3.