The Wiire - April's NPD: Grand Theft Mario Kart

NPD Group, a market research company that issues monthly sales figures for game systems and software, has released the numbers for April, and they're huge. For the first half, April was a relatively quiet month, as it usually is for game launches, but at the very end, two very big things happened: Grand Theft Auto IV and Mario Kart Wii. These launches made for April showers of money at retail. Here are the figures for system sales:

Nintendo Wii -- 714,200 (down 7k from March)
Nintendo DS -- 414,800 (down 283k)
PlayStation Portable -- 192,000 (down 105k)
Xbox 360 -- 188,000 (down 74k)
PlayStation 3 -- 187,100 (down 70k)
PlayStation 2 -- 124,400 (down 92k)

The DS dropped the most from the previous month, but almost half a million units sold in a month isn't bad for a system that nearly everyone owns by now. The Wii dropped the least, and is still going strong. The non-Nintendo competitors split the difference with an average of an 85,000-unit decline from the previous month.

Now on to the big numbers, software sales:

Grand Theft Auto IV (360) -- 1,850,000
Mario Kart Wii (Wii) -- 1,120,000
Grand Theft Auto IV (PS3) -- 1,000,000
Wii Play (Wii) -- 360,000
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) -- 326,000
Gran Turismo 5: Prologue (PS3) -- 224,000
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness (DS) -- 202,000
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time (DS) -- 202,000
Guitar Hero III (Wii) -- 152,000
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (360) -- 141,000

Mario Kart Wii drops a banana peel in front of the PS3 version of GTA IV, but can't get a blue shell to take out the 360 version, so it finishes a strong second. Further back in the race, we see the usual contenders, including Wii Play, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Guitar Hero, and Call of Duty 4. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and Gran Turismo 5: Prologue made their debut on the charts, but it looks like most people were saving their money for the end of the month.

It's very likely that we'll see this month's top sellers return for a rematch in May's NPD figures, so watch for it around this time next month.

April's NPD: Grand Theft Mario Kart

by Skylar Wilcox (2008-05-16)addthis_url = location.href; addthis_title = document.title; addthis_pub = 'thewiire';

by Skylar Wilcox (2008-05-16)