The case of the missing T games, a possible Wii Play stumble, the absence of Ninja Blade and more April NPD observations await you below. Chew on the following:
Missing T's: Of the top 10 games listed in the April NPD software charts, six are on Nintendo platforms and rated E. Of the remaining four non-Nintendo-platform games, three are rated M. There is one T-rated game, a Guitar Hero spin-off.
Change of order: For each of the first three months of the year, the order of hardware, from best-selling to lowest was the same: Wii, DS, Xbox 360, PS3, PSP then PS2. In April, a price drop on the PS2 and a new DS shook up that hardware order. It became: DS, Wii, XBox 360, PS2, PS3, PSP.
Wii Play on the decline: Nintendo's remote-bundled mini-game mega-hit is finally losing steam, dropping from 386k in February to 281k in March and now down to 170k in April.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars doing a slow burn at best: The game, which sold 89,000 copies in the 19 days it was out during its first NPD month had 27 more days on sale during the new reporting period. It failed to sell 91,000 copies, the lowest software sales number listed on the top 10.
New DS owners like old games? With a new DS, the DSi, out in last month's reporting period, consumers had a chance to buy some new DS games. We don't know how many DSi purchasers there were out of the one million DS purchasers in April — nor how many of those people were new to the system — but we do know that those shoppers failed to put DSi quasi-launch game Rhythm Heaven into the overall software top 10, guaranteeing it fewer than 91,000 copies sold. What did appear in the top 10 — absent last month — were the DS games New Super Mario Brothers and Mario Kart DS, both of which were released before 2008.
Notable new releases that failed to make the overall software top 10: Rhythm Heaven (April 5), Ninja Blade (April 7) Excitebots (April 20), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1 - possibly arrived in stores after the May 2 NPD cut-off date).
What'd we miss?