For those who love arguing about gaming sales stats, we hope we've devised a way for you to argue better.
Later today the NPD group will release the monthly hardware and software top 10 lists for the month of April. Console owners will debate them. Companies will seem pleased.
But many people will be comparing apples to oranges if they try to compare April figures with those released in March.
The reason so many reader and reporter comparisons of NPD numbers are misleading is because each NPD reporting period covers a unique amount of days. The March reporting period was 35 days long. This month's will probably be shorter. That means you can't compare, say, the PS3's March NPD numbers to April numbers and say for certain if the sales went up or down.
So we're going to divide by the number of days for you and give you the NPDs as they would average out per day. Hence: the NPD-PDs (that'd be National Purchase Diary (numbers) Per Day, of course.)
Here are the figures for March. Later, we'll have stats for April.
March 2009 U.S. Video Game Hardware Sales - NPD-PD version
Based on the March NPD date range: 3/1/09-4/4/09
Wii - 17,171 units/day
Nintendo DS - 16,086 units/day
Xbox 360 - 9,429 units/day
PlayStation 3 - 6,229 units/day
PSP - 4,800 units/day
PlayStation 2- 3,200 units/day
What do you think, number fans? Let us know how we can better serve your quest for knowledge and your need to accurately debate the sales of video game hardware.
[PIC]