Microsoft’s Xbox 360 registered another month atop the U.S. console market in November, posting record sales as the peak holiday shopping season got under way.
The Xbox 360 sold 1.7 million units in the U.S. in November, according to NPD Group data cited by the Redmond company. Numbers weren’t released for the competing Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3, but Microsoft says the Xbox 360 was the only one of the consoles to sell more than 1 million units, with hardware unit sales nearly double the total of its nearest competitor.
Overall sales of video-game consoles, accessories and software at physical stores in the U.S. were flat across the industry in November, rising 0.4 percent to $3 billion, according to data released by NPD.
NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier said in an email, “While content sales grew substantially thanks to a great slate of new content, a decline in average retail price in all categories with the exception of portable hardware resulted in flat dollar sales even though unit sales grew for console hardware, as well as console, portable, and pc software.”
The top-selling game in the country was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, published by Activision Blizzard for Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and Windows PCs. First-month sales of Modern Warfare 3 topped last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops by about 7 percent, according to NPD data.
The news caps a week in which Microsoft rolled out its revamped Xbox Live dashboard, hoping to attract new console buyers with live television integration, voice controls and other new features.
Globally, the console race is tighter than it has been in the U.S. recently. Cumulatively, as of the end of September, Nintendo’s Wii still led the current console generation in worldwide unit sales, with nearly 90 million Wii units sold, although much of that lead came from the early success of the Wii, and sales have since dwindled.
Microsoft reported a cumulative total of 57.6 million Xbox 360 units sold as of Sept. 30, compared with 55.5 million PS3 units sold overall as of the same date.
