Game Sales Up

For the first time since 2008, game sales have actually gone up over the previous year's sales. The NPD figures have arrived (perhaps smuggled out from behind their pay wall by heroic resistance fighters) and reveal that November sales were up 8% over last November... they even made it to the level of Best Sales Month Ever, ringing up $2.99 billion. Software was up 4%, hardware was up 2%, but the big winner was the accessories category, which was up 69%. Thank you, Kinect and Move.

Sales were also helped by Call of Duty: Black Ops, which in one month has become the 7th best-selling game ever with 8.4 million units sold. Sales were so good that overall sales for the year are now down only 5% instead of the 8% it was at last month.

Looking more closely at the data we find some sore spots. Portable hardware and software was down over last year. So Nintendo's troubles continue. The Wii was outsold by the Xbox 360, which is impressive especially when you consider the price differential. (Sales data put the 360 at 1.37 million units, the Wii at 1.27, and the PS3 at 530K.)

The disturbing part is that the joy was not widespread. It's not like sales were up for everything; take away Black Ops and the Kinect and the picture looks pretty dismal. This does not look like a resurgence in the game industry; it looks like a couple of new products did really well. Which doesn't mean that the industry is looking at a good 2011.