SCEA reacts to April 2008 NPD results

SCEA president and CEO Jack Tretton has issued their company’s official reaction to the latest results from the NPD Group. The PS3 may be trailing its rivals, but Sony‘s pretty happy about a lot of things. The theme seems to be “never mind the Xbox 360’s stats, there’s plenty of good news to share.” See why in the full article ahead.

The NPD Group results for April are in and the three major hardware companies have started giving out their respective reactions. Sony, whose PlayStation 3 sold 187,071 units, expressed optimism that its machine’s big year is well on track.

Sony went about its statement by comparing the current stats to its performance over the past year. Sony says software sales have improved by 410 percent from April of 2007, while total annual hardware sales are up by 127 percent.

In a written statement, Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO and president Jack Tretton said that the picture is looking good for their console. He says numbers are already on the rise and the rest of this year’s big releases aren’t even in yet. He reminds everyone that such trump cards as Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, LittleBigPlanet, and Resistance 2 are yet to see their debuts.

“With exciting PlayStation Network innovations and our strongest console-driving titles of the year still on the horizon, PS3 remains on pace for a breakthrough year,” he adds.

Lastly, Sony took a swipe at the competition by talking about the attach rate of Grand Theft Auto 4 for their platform compared to the Microsoft Xbox 360’s stats. Sony said 23 percent of the PS3’s user base (in North America) had bought the Rockstar juggernaut. The company says this is 29 percent better than its closest rival’s. No raw numbers were given, though.

Here are other number (taking from North America alone) that you might find pretty staggering too:

• Gran Turismo 5 Prologue downloads: 6 million pieces of content
• total PSN DLC downloaded: 73 million
• total number of PSN registered users: 3.9 million
• Dual Shock 3 sales: over US$ 10.9 million