Xbox sales on Black Friday jump 25% from 2007
Microsoft console outpaces PlayStation, no mention of Wii
By Danny King -- Video Business, 12/2/2008
DEC. 2 | Microsoft’s sales of its Xbox 360 games console on the day after Thanksgiving jumped 25% from a year earlier, helping the company in its effort to reverse a decline in revenue from its videogame business for the quarter ended Sept. 30.
Titles such as Gears of War 2, Lips and Fable II helped Xbox outpace Sony’s competing PlayStation 3 console by a three-to-one margin on so-called Black Friday, Microsoft said in a statement yesterday.
Strong holiday sales may help Microsoft reverse what was a 22% drop in sales from Xbox 360 consoles and games for the most recently completed quarter, a decline largely caused by falling console prices and the year earlier release of Halo 3.
Total Web traffic for toys and videogame sales in the U.S. on Black Friday jumped 73% from a year earlier and helped total Internet retail traffic rise 10%, Nielsen said in a separate statement yesterday.
Xbox’s increased demand also is consistent with a U.S. videogame market in which year-to-date revenue through October was $13.1 billion, representing a 25% increase from a year earlier, according to NPD Group. That month, Microsoft sold 371,000 Xbox units, about double PlayStation’s, though only half of Nintendo’s Wii console. Microsoft didn’t mention Black Friday sales of Wii consoles in yesterday’s statement.
Microsoft in September dropped the prices of its Xbox consoles in its battle against PlayStation and Wii for market share of the booming videogame market. Microsoft cut the price of its Xbox 360 Arcade, the cheapest version of the model, by $80 to $199, while prices on the Xbox 360 Pro and Xbox 360 Elite were each reduced by $50 to $299 and $399, respectively.
