Handheld Game Units Dominate Fall Sales
The Nintendo DS trailed only the Wii and PSP outsold the PlayStation consoles in October, according to NPD.NPD sales data for the month of October shows strong support for handheld gaming.
Nintendo DS was the second best-selling platform right behind Wii and PSP sold better than PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3.
Of course, Wii trounced the competition nearly 2:1 thanks to well over 800,000 in sales. Microsoft couldn't even move half of that with Xbox 360 chiming in at a respectable 370k. Lower sales didn't affect the reception of Xbox 360-exclusive Fable II, though. Peter Molyneux's much anticipated sequel was top of the charts with 790k copies sold.
Charming titles performed extremely well in October, as PlayStation 3-exclusive LittleBigPlanet made a littlebig debut at number 8 on the October charts with a solid 215k copies.
Not a single handheld game made it into the top ten, interestingly. Phenomenal hardware sales--almost half a million for DS and just shy of 200,000 for PSP--aren't translating to game sales. That may be a factor of consumer demand for multimedia content and not just gaming alone.
Tracy Erickson, GamePro