The holiday season is the biggest sales time for the videogame
industry. Both Sony and Nintendo have reported positive results following the
Thanksgiving shopping week.
Sony said that its Black Friday sales this year are up
nearly three-fold, though the company declined to provide real numbers. As
expected, Wii sales hit a record high for the year, selling
350,000 throughout the week – enough for Nintendo president Reggie
Fils-Aime to find it impossible in locating a console.
The Wii wasn’t the only video game system selling well last
week, as Microsoft has announced that it sold 310,000 Xbox 360 consoles in the
U.S. for the week of November 18.
While it could be argued that Nintendo may have sold more
Wii if there were adequate stocks to meet demand, Microsoft said that its
console was also the victim of shortages.
“We turned around and replenished those units,” Xbox 360
product manager Aaron Greenberg said to Next-Gen.
“We’re seeing thousands and thousands of top big box retail stores reporting
outages depending on SKUs, and some reporting outages of the whole Xbox 360
line.”
The recently re-launched and re-tooled Xbox 360 Core as the
Xbox 360 Arcade bundle is also performing better than Microsoft’s expectations,
further proving the consumer’s extreme
price sensitivity in videogame products. The Xbox 360 Arcade is priced at $279,
while the Wii is $249.
“We heard from one of our top retailers that the launch of
Arcade was the biggest Xbox 360 sales week since Christmas of last year. It’s
performed above what we’ve expected and is a bigger percentage of the mix than
what we thought it would be,” said Greenberg. “We knew Halo 3 would be a big hit, but we didn’t know that Arcade, Scene It and Guitar Hero would be things that families would be buying this
holiday. Hopefully that trend will continue.”