Console News for Wednesday, October 13

VGChartz Releases Sales Numbers For Week Ending Oct. 2

Wii – 138,378 PS3 – 149,925 Xbox360 – 179,491

Sales figures are in and they aren’t looking pretty for Nintendo.  The Wii lost more ground against both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 last week by 11,000 units and 41,000 units respectively.  This is part of a continuing slide in sales that began with the Xbox gaining ground in July after the release of the 360S line, and recently became worse as the PS3 vaulted over the Wii by 22,000 units in September.  Trends continuing the way they are, it’s very possible that Nintendo could find itself being left in third place for 2010’s total sales.  The tally so far (Beginning from 02-January):

Wii – 7,162,858 PS3 – 5,614,468 XBox 360 – 5,610,057

Source: VGChartz

The other surprising twist is Microsoft closing in on Sony after packing in almost a million unit lead through June.  Microsoft has since seen a massive boost in sales as older units were marked down to make way for the 360S, and the subsequent sales of the newly styled unit.  The gap for the year is now only a paltry 5,000 units.  If this trend continues, Microsoft is poised to come in number one for home console sales for the year.

NPD Discontinuing Public Disclosure Of Console Sales

An article posted yesterday by VG247 states that as of now, NPD will not be releasing monthly hardware unit sales figures to the public, leaving the console manufacturers to do so. 

According to Wedbush Morgan analyst, Michael Pachter, “I pay a lot for access to the data, and probably could have skipped the hardware piece and gotten from the manufacturers directly, so they don’t want paying customers like me to turn off their subscriptions.”

The question I have to pose is how can he pay so much money for all that data and still be so horrible at predicting stuff?

Source: VG247

AT&T Uverse coming to Xbox 360

Documents leaked to Engadget show that not only is AT&T Uverse coming to the Xbox 360 for real, but real soon.  November 7th actually.  Just in time for the holidays and coinciding with the release of Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360, this should be quite a booster on its own. 

The question is, will it be enabled with a Kinect friendly menu as was demonstrated with the upcoming ESPN app at E3 earlier this year?  Only time will tell!

Unfortunately, I see this as being a mutually exclusive deal.  Meaning, that other big name providers such as Comcast will likely not be able to participate in releasing their own version, leaving people to either go without, or forcibly switch over to AT&T for their service providing.  Perhaps Sony will work out a deal with another player?

Source: Engadget

So far this Christmas season is looking to be quite lively in the console world if your name doesn’t have ‘end’ in it.  I’ll be making my console sales predictions at the end of the month.  You may want to stay tuned.

~W75