Video game console sales in May lowest since 2006

By on Jun 14, 2011 at 6:50 PM
Gaming June 14, 2011

Sales of video game consoles in the U.S. hit a five-year low last month according to new data from research firm NPD Group. “May 2011 was the lowest month of sales for the industry since October 2006,” NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in a statement. “A light slate of new releases is at the heart of this month’s performance.” Combined sales of hardware, software and accessories totalled $743 million according to the firm, representing a 14% decline compared to May 2010. Software sales were down 21% from the same month a year prior to $400 million. Microsoft managed to combat the trend — and keep total console sales in May from sliding to unheard-of lows — having sold 270,000 Xbox 360 consoles, up 39% year-over-year. Take-Two Interactive’s L.A. Noire was the top-selling software title for the month.

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  • Anonymous

    Software sells hardware. There’s no software coming out in the near future. Therefore, shitty hardware sales.

    Deep, this is not.

  • Anonymous

    I would think anyone that wanted a 360, Wii or PS3 would have bought them already

  • mplsboywonder

    In my opinion the XBOX360 is the king of consoles, but the fact is is that the 360 debuted in May of 2005.  Pushing 7 years.

    I think we all want the next generation of consoles.  I want something that blows my mind!!!  Most of us have 1080p 55″ uber nice TV’s and it is time for the NEXT LEVEL console to come and amaze us.

    Every new release now just seems so blahhhhhhh.

  • Anonymous

    Nice picture.

  • Ghostshadow

    Blame the ps3 and all the hacking problem

  • Anonymous

    blame the ps3 for the 2 month psn outage. why would any consumer by a internet connected system when, you can”t play online. 

  • Cats

    Drrr probs because lets see no “new” systems have come out and when more than 1 in 4 households have a gaming system why buy a new one

    • http://genesisx.myopenid.com/ Genesis

      Yes, looks like a cyclical thing to me as well. The current gen of consoles started coming out in 2005/2006 which was the last time console sales were this low and everybody probably has one of these.  Time for a console refresh.  We know Wii-U is coming next year.  Sony and MS will follow I am sure.  People are waiting for the new consoles and games that run on the new hardware.

  • Anonymous

    It shows interest in the console is approaching an all time low as well, just like @356f78fb58d47af1c638eeb275dca534:disqus stated, Pushing 7 years.  My PC is light years ahead of this generations consoles.  Maybe even the next generation if pushing a single GTX580.

    • Anonymous

      Any PC with decent specs will be ahead of the next-gen consoles when it comes to graphics power. That doesn’t actually matter all that much though, since consoles only have to push 1080p, which is already on the low end for PC’s. The difference in CPU power is much smaller than you think though, and you can expect the CPU’s in the next-gen Xbox or PS3 to be ahead of any desktop x86 chip on the market today. People tend to forget that x86 CPU’s are designed to perform reasonably well on the broadest range of applications, while console CPU’s are optimized for 1 thing: games. In terms of system architecture, this means high floating point performance, high memory bandwidth, low-level cache control, and customized compilers that replace the complex logic in typical x86 CPU’s to optimize specifically for the console at compile time, instead of trying to make up for sub-optimal code targeted to run on any x86 chip. 

      Even today you can buy a new PC that doesn’t have 3 cores running at over 3 Ghz, with the RAM running at the same clock speeds (like the 360 CPU). On paper, a PS3 has higher floating point performance and much higher memory bandwidth than a midrange x86 system, not to mention a much higher theoretical IPC (instructions per cycle) because it has 6 autonomous vector processing cores. Of course performance on paper =/= performance in real life, of course a single 360 core is not as fast as a single Core i7 core, and of course there are all kinds of other limitations that limit the performance you will see in practice, but don’t blindly assume consoles are weak compared to PC’s just because PC’s are stuffed with so much brute-force GPU power.

      • Anonymous

        Agreed, except time after time, we hear “The XBOX CPU is so powerful, the PS3 CPU is a supercomputer”.  Theoretically speaking, yes Cell broadband engine CPU was a number crusher, but game players did not see massively parallel programs being released on the PS3.  In fact, the typical bottle neck on the consoles turned out to be RAM and since I do not see next gen consoles sporting 12GB of RAM (there are people out there using 12GB of RAM), I don’t see consoles crushing a PC anytime soon.

        But, the CPU will be very powerful on the next gen consoles to provide better physics, AI, etc… 
        Will it be utilized to its fullest?  No :)   Because the next gen consoles also have to have RAM which MFG always sacrifice for more CPU/GPU power.  Sure, the console will have 1GB of RAM most likely, but it not only has to play games now, it has to do EVERYTHING as we are seeing with this generation of consoles.

        So, yes, the CPU on the gen consoles will be very powerful, may use Blu Ray Disc as storage/delivery medium, digital downloads as well, an even more enhanced online experience then now, and I have to say it again, an insane CPU, but where the console starts with CPU power, the PC market takes over, because users can change there CPUs whenever they desire, or there motherboard, or there video card and PC games (not all but most) do come optimized to take advantage of the additional resources on a PC that are not available on a console.

      • Anonymous

        I think there is no debate that PC’s will always overtake consoles relatively early in the console’s lifecycle, and there is also no point arguing that paper specs are often deceptive. These are obvious.

        My point is that people talking about PC’s vs. consoles always make the following mistakes and, adding them up, to conclude that consoles deliver crap game performance and must be hideously slow just because they are ‘already 5 years old’

        - Overestimating how good general-purpose x86 CPU’s are for games
        - Underestimate how good console CPU’s are for games
        - Underestimate the importance of high-bandwidth RAM and advanced cache control
        - Underestimate the progress console devs can make exploiting console hardware to the fullest
        - Underestimate how crappy many PC games are programmed and optimized
        - Overestimate how much you need a typical brute-force PC GPU to create great visuals at 720p or 1080p

        As for consoles being memory-constrained: yes, in terms of RAM size they are right now, but in terms of bandwidth they are usually way ahead of PC’s at launch, for example the bandwidth available to the PS3 Cell processor still exceeds what you get in a high-end PC today. I don’t think the new Xbox or the PS4 will only have 1GB of RAM by the way, I expect 2GB or 4GB. Still a lot less than a decent PC, but the console isn’t running a whole OS and a few dozen background processes, and with enough attention you can get a whole lot of stuff running in a constrained memory environment. The fact that you have titles running on consoles with 512MB RAM, with a PC version that has 2GB as recommended spec says enough, PC titles are often extremely memory inefficient (for example streaming geometry and textures from disc is something you see a lot on consoles, but rarely on PC games). 

        Anyway, I think there’s a whole world between ‘what your game PC is capable of’ and ‘what you actually get’, and that this gap is much smaller when you talk about consoles. Add to that the fact that the difference between PC hardware and console hardware is not as big as many people think.

        The only reason felt like spending all this time writing this is that I always get a bit annoyed reading the typical PC fanboy vs. console fanboy discussions, with PC gamers always pointing out how their PC’s blow away these ’5 year old console hardware’. It’s not as clear-cut.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_GP2WYAHXS6CRUREISWBGPUSUGE Michael

    Well i can tell you i’ve been spending the cash on games. Modern Warfare2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Battlefield 2, Halo ODST, Halo Reach all bought in the last 6 months. And I’ve got Gears 3, and Modern Warfare 3 on preorder via GameStop.

    You’d have to stand back and look at the Sony hackery that been going on as a cause of the lack of sales. And with the >$125.00 BluRay players it’s had to justify the PS3 as a source for BluRay. And with the Microfsoft DeathRing and such a high return rate it’s warding people off.

  • Al Chablis

    Oh, she’s been doing something naughty with vibration ends of those controllers. *drool*

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