Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 javelin-bombed every other videogame in the month of November, selling an astonishing 6 million copies, the NPD Group reported Thursday.
The shooter sold 4.2 million units on Xbox 360 and 1.87 million on PlayStation 3 in the U.S. last month. Other big winners were New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Assassin's Creed II, but nothing even came close to Call of Duty.
On the hardware front, Wii and Nintendo DS ruled all, selling over a million units each. Despite a price drop and hardware refresh renewing interest in Sony's PlayStation 3, it still came in third place behind the Xbox 360 this month, which is $100 cheaper.
- Nintendo DS 1.70M
- Wii 1.26M
- Xbox 360 819.5K
- PlayStation 3 710.4K
- PSP 293.9K
- PlayStation 2 203.1K
Software numbers and scattered thoughts below.
- Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (360, Activision Blizzard) 4,200,000
- Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3, Activision Blizzard) 1,870,000
- New Super Mario Bros. Wii* (Wii, Nintendo Of America) 1,390,000
- Assassin's Creed II* (360, Ubisoft) 794,700
- Left 4 Dead 2* (360, Electronic Arts) 744,000
- Wii Sports Resort* (Wii, Nintendo Of America) 720,200
- Wii Fit Plus* (Wii, Nintendo Of America) 679,000
- Assassin's Creed II* (PS3, Ubisoft) 448,400
- Dragon Age: Origins* (360, Electronic Arts) 362,100
- Mario Kart w/ Wheel *(Wii, Nintendo Of America) 315,000
Overall, the games industry is down 7.6% over last year. This is higher than it would have been thanks to astonishing sales of Modern Warfare 2 -- analyst Jesse Divnich of EEDAR pointed out in an email that the game accounted for twenty freaking percent of all software sales for the month, in dollars.
The Nintendo DS set a sales record, selling more units than any portable game console ever has in the month of November. The flipside to this coin for Nintendo is that the all-time record is held by Wii, which moved over 2 million units last Black Friday and dropped down by nearly 40 percent this month.
In fact, everything was down this month over last year except DS and PS3, which is up 87 percent, clearly illustrating that the latest price drop really flipped a switch in consumers' minds as to the value proposition put forth by Sony's box.
The big surprise in terms of hardware sales is PSP. Yes, percentagewise it didn't drop as much as Wii, but Wii at least can say that it is the number-one videogame console by a nice wide margin. PSP just got its ass kicked, without qualification.
Nintendo's big four games will continue to move throughout the holiday selling season, but by February or March we should know whether any of the newcomers will be the sort of long tail products that the company has come to rely on -- that is, whether they'll continue to pop up on the Top Ten charts every month after their contemporaries have long dropped off the map.
Wii Sports Resort has the best chance of doing this, I think. I will be very interested to see if New Super Mario Bros. Wii has the right stuff -- whether it drops out of view like Mario Galaxy or keeps selling like gangbusters like New Super Mario Bros. DS. In other words: Is it the software, or is is the system?
Image courtesy Activision
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