Next-Gen.biz Analysis: NPD Hardware Sales 2007

January 22nd, 2008, 19:09 Posted By: wraggster

With a full year's worth of data, we can now see how the three big consoles fared during all of 2007. The weekly console sales rates for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii are shown below.

December 2007 was the best month of hardware sales ever for the Xbox 360, up 11.5% from the record it set in December 2006. For the entire year of 2007, sales of the Xbox 360 were up 17.7% from 2006. At the beginning of 2007, the installed base for the Xbox 360 stood at 4.5 million systems on 14 months of sales. By the end of 2007, just 12 months later, the installed base had more than doubled to 9.15 million systems.

The keys to Microsoft's success were the August price drops and the launch of Halo 3 in late September. Together they effectively started Microsoft's holiday sales surge a month early, pushing monthly Xbox 360 sales up over Wii sales briefly.

The biggest win for the Xbox 360 in 2007 is quite possibly what did not happen: consumers did not shun the system after Microsoft acknowledged higher than acceptable hardware failure rates. The billion dollars that Microsoft set aside to cover the extended warranty program is costly, for sure, but as PR it has worked brilliantly. While many consumers know about the "red ring of death" failures, they bought more of the systems than ever before after Microsoft's mea culpa.

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?op...=8750&Itemid=2

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