Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft announce their NPD achievements for May 2008

NPD Group has released the market performance results for May 2008, and already the PR armies at Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have began to churn out their reformatted versions of the results. Of course, each one talks only about what they’ve achieved so far in the fifth month of the Year of the Rat, but what happens when we put them all together? Yes, we get the full NPD May story.

 

All three console gaming giants rolled out their respective press releases in the wake of NPD Group’s May market performance report, and each one has its own story to tell.

Nintendo continued to swim in their successful monthly run, Sony stood proud of its steadily increasing performance, while Microsoft toyed with factual figures to stick into their competitions’ faces. Okay, maybe they all had something to say about “the other platform.”

Nintendo continued to stay proud of the Nintendo Wii’s 10.2 million US lifetime sales, which brings the world sales of the leading console to around 25 million. The DS rose to 452,608 units and grabbed a US lifetime sales figure of more than 20 million.

Sony was happy to note that they exceeded the Xbox 360 in over-the-counter sales by 22,106 consoles, bringing the PlayStation 3 at second place for sales in May. They managed to sell 182,310 PSP units, according to NPD.

Though Microsoft didn’t mention console sales early into their announcement, they did mention their May Grand Theft Auto IV sales, which skyrocketed to 871,000 units in just that month. That’s twice as much as the PS3 copies sold, and even pointed out that their hardware attach rate continues to lead the industry.

Nintendo couldn’t duke it out in the GTA4 figures battle, but they claimed that 19 of the top 30 games sold in May were all targeted for the Nintendo console. This figure is a mix of third and first-party titles, either aimed at the Nintendo Wii, DS, or a combination of the Nintendo consoles and other game platforms.

Wii Play and Mario Kart Wii stole the show for the top three games sold last month, occupying both second and third spots. First place belonged to non-platform-moving GTA4. Sony was happy to announce that their software sales increased 234% over the last year at 1.26 million, thanks to SingStar, GTA4, and Haze.

Microsoft offered that 21 of the top 25 games were best sold on the Xbox 360, while also jabbing a few points here and there: “Eighteen of those franchises were previous best-sellers, and two were exclusives, on the PlayStation 2.”

We’d like to play “compare the press releases” more, but this is about as much as they could give, without overstating what NPD already made apparent. We’ll post more updates on the movements of the game industry as soon as we come across them. Stay tuned.