Software Sales by System

From information released by Microsoft, we estimate that approximately 3 million units of software were sold for the Xbox 360 in October.

In fact, we estimate that Nintendo sold approximately the same number of units of software for the Nintendo Wii. Sony announced that 2.3 million units of PlayStation 3 software were sold during the same period.

Even if our estimate is strong only for the Xbox 360, the results point out an interesting difference between the two platforms.

That is, PlayStation 3 owners are buying more software (on average) than Xbox 360 owners, once we take the size of the installed base into account.

(Provided we have estimated Wii software sales correctly, the same would be true comparing the PlayStation 3 userbase to the Wii userbase.)

Roughly speaking, one in four Xbox 360 owners purchased a game in October compared to two in five PS3 owners.

With these software estimates, we can further calculate the year-to-date software sales for each of the current-generation consoles and compare to the same period in 2007.

The results above suggest that the PlayStation 3 was woefully behind in software sales during the first 10 months of 2007, but has made great strides in 2008 and effectively tripled its software sales.

(In fact, Sony noted in its press materials that software sales just for October were up 200% year-on-year, which is completely consistent with our estimates.)

By comparison, the more established Xbox 360 platform has increased its YTD software sales by a more modest 26% over the same period in 2007.

As the Wii dominates in hardware sales, so it also dominates in software, with an estimated 38 million units of software in the first 10 months of the year. In other words, Nintendo has sold over 2.5 times as much Wii software this year as it did during the same period in 2007.