NPD: October Game Sales Up 1%, Totals Up 16%

NPD's October video game hardware and software sales for North American have been released, and game sales actually saw a disappointingly slight 1% increase to $369 million, with total industry sales (including hardware and peripherals) up 16% to $642 million. Nonetheless, the results might be considered a bit of a stutter for the continuing console transition, given that Wedbush Morgan predicted game sales up 10% and Lazard Capital Markets suggested they might increase 15-20% for the month. In addition, with September 2006's overall NPD results up 38%, year on year, with game sales rising by 29 percent to $446 million thanks to strong performances from multiple game titles, the marginal increase for October (apparently partly due to the reduced price points for current-gen titles) is likely to disappoint some. However, with the Wii and PlayStation 3 launches to occur during November, many will not be overly concerned by long-term ramifications for the results, which saw Vivendi's Scarface for PlayStation 2 top the charts, closely followed by Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent for Xbox 360 and Madden '07 for PlayStation 2. In terms of hardware numbers, the Nintendo DS dominated, thanks to continuing demand for its DS Lite redesign and the success of its casual game titles, selling 360,000 for the month. The PlayStation 2 came in at around 235,000, with the Xbox 360 slightly disappointingly selling just under 220,000 units, the Game Boy Advance just under 170,000, and the PSP a marginally lackluster 130,000, almost a third the tally of the DS. Gamasutra will update with further commentary from Wedbush Morgan and other analysts when they release their research notes on the results on Friday morning.