NPD Sales: Microsoft's Take

We've already seen Nintendo's take on the NPD numbers, and now here's Microsoft's. Rather than simply send out comment, Microsoft issued a press release with charts and graphs from their E3 presentation that reiterated many of their strategic and content announcements.

I'll put the paragraphs that actually deal with the NPD results specifically after the jump.

Our lead in worldwide install base continues to grow, with more than
11.6 million Xbox 360 consoles sold across 37 countries, the largest install base of any next-gen console. This June 2007, we sold 197K Xbox
360 consoles – 40,000 units more than we sold last month.

Which is fuzzy math, as we know from this morning: the June NPD was a five-week reporting period while last month's was only four weeks. In both cases, Microsoft sold about 40,000 units per week, which means sales (while indeed slightly higher week-on-week) were for all intents and purposes flat.

According to NPD, three of the top 10 games in June were Xbox 360 games or exclusives, including “Forza Motorsport 2” (MGS), “Guitar Hero II”
(Activision) and “The Darkness” (2K Games). This marks 22 appearances for third-party titles on Xbox 360 to break the monthly top 10
best-selling games list in the past 9 months. Third party games continue to thrive with half of all retail spending taking place on
Xbox 360.

Well, they got me here. One of their big talking points at E3 was that regardless of console sales, third parties are doing better on Xbox 360.

Month over month, consumers’ commitment to Xbox 360 continues, with record-breaking attach rates of 6.1 games and 3.2 accessories sold per console. Since launch, we’ve sold 20.1 million games, more than our next-gen competitors combined.

You can't really poke holes in this one, either. I really do want to see what happens when third parties actually start shipping Wii games that are as tuned to the WIi audience as the games they're shipping on Xbox 360.