The console wars have been raging for years and will continue to be fought as long as there are multiple consoles available to the public. The lead in sales has been traded amongst the big three consoles including the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3.
The latest figures are in from NPD for February 2010. According to the numbers, the Xbox 360 was the best selling console for the month, outselling both the Wii and the PS3.
The month was bad for the industry as a whole with sales down 15% overall compared to February of 2009. Microsoft moved 422,000 Xbox 360s during the month while Nintendo moved 397,900 Wii consoles. Sony sold 360,100 PS3 consoles during the month and moved 101,900 PS2s in February.
Nintendo's DS ruled the portable gaming market selling 613,200 units compared to a meager 133,400 PSPs sold for the month. The top game title for February was Bioshock 2 moving 750,000 copies across all platforms with the Xbox 360 version selling the most copies at 562,900 units.
The Wii title New Super Mario Bros. took second with a close 555,600 copies sold. The few PS3 games making the top ten list for February were Dante's Inferno: Divine Edition at eighth place with 242,500 copies and Heavy Rain in tenth at 219,300 copies sold. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is still selling very well in the third spot with 314,300 copies sold on the Xbox 360 and in sixth as well with 252,800 sold for the PS3.
Many of the game consoles have been expanding their capabilities over the last few months to appeal to more than the gamer crowd. Sony aimed for broad appeal from the start with the PS3 by adding the Blu-ray player and creating what is arguably one of the best Blu-ray players on the market. The big benefit of the PS3 is that Sony has continually added new updates and features to the machine like upscaling and a 3D update for the PS3 is coming this year making PS3 owners one of the few groups that won’t have to buy new hardware to enjoy 3D Blu-ray films.
Sony is also looking to improve how games operate and look by reducing the size of the OS used on the PS3. A recent size reduction for the OS gave developers 70MB of additional memory to work with. Extra memory is nice, but developers said 70MB wouldn’t make a huge difference in game quality.
Source: DailyTech
