With the release today of its March video game industry sales
report, NPD has provided fodder for just about anyone who wants to read
the numbers the way they want. Or trumpet them.
For example, in an e-mail from Nintendo, I learned that, according
to NPD, "In March, Nintendo again defined industry momentum in both
home and portable video game sales."
In other words, Nintendo's sales of 720,000 Wiis topped console
sales. And Nintendo also dug around in NPD's report and discovered that
it could also tout that it had the best-selling game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which sold 2.7 million copies in the month.
At the same time, Microsoft weighed in with its own celebratory e-mail,
which begins by stating that, according to NPD, "Consumers continue to
make the ultimate vote for Xbox 360 as the console of choice."
Its rationale: That consumers have spent more on Xboxes, $9.4 billion for its entire lifecycle, than on "other game consoles."
So, we've got Nintendo saying it "defined industry momentum" and Microsoft arguing that gamers cast the "ultimate vote" for it.
And this is proof positive, of course, that numbers can be manipulated any way one wants.
Unless you're Sony, that is. I didn't see an e-mail or a press
release about the PlayStation 3's March performance, either in my inbox
or on the official PlayStation Web site. And the way I read the
numbers, there's good reason for that: The PS3 was only the
fifth-best-selling console in March--after the Wii, Nintendo's DS,
Sony's PlayStation Portable, and the Xbox 360. In fact, the PS3 only
barely outsold Sony's PlayStation 2.
I think it's very clear that all these companies are going to
posture and fluff their tail feathers and try to elbow each other out
of the way--month after month into perpetuity. And because NPD--the
leader in gathering industry sales numbers--and others put out so many different metrics, there's always something for everybody to brag about. Well, almost always.
Update: I got an email from Sony after this story was published
trumpeting the PlayStation 3's 98 percent sales growth from the same
period a year earlier.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3, NPD
