Xbox outsells Wii in record November, but not by much

By Jeffrey Van Camp December 10, 2010

Kinect — Image used with permission by copyright holder

NPD has released official sales figures for November and everyone but Sony has reason to celebrate. Video game sales were up 8 percent, reaching $2.99 billion. It was the best November on record, topping 2008 by about $30 million.

Despite a number of analysts playing the prediction game a few days ago and forecasting Wii’s doom, the Nintendo had one of its best Novembers yet, selling 1.27 million consoles, up 0.8 percent from last year. It was, however, narrowly defeated by the Xbox 360. Microsoft’s console, pumped up from the success of Kinect, nabbed 1.37 million in sales, up a crazy 67 percent from last November. Beating all competitors, the Nintendo DS managed 1.5 million units, down from 1.7 million last year.

The only sad panda in the room is Sony. Despite the debut of PlayStation Move, PS3 sales were down 25 percent from 2009. 530,000 units were sold during the month–less than half the sales of Nintendo or Microsoft. In September and October, the PS3 outsold Wii, which lost its monthly lead to the 360 in June.

Here are the best selling games of November:

Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC, DS) – 8,400,000
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft, Xbox 360, PS3)
Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft, Wii)
Madden NFL 11 (Electronic Arts, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP)
Fable III (Microsoft, Xbox 360)
Donkey Kong Country Returns (Nintendo, Wii)
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (Electronic Arts, PS3, 360, Wii, PC)
Gran Turismo 5 (Sony, PS3)
NBA 2K11 (Take-Two Interactive, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP,PC)
Wii Fit Plus (Nintendo, Wii)

Oddly, none of the best-selling games are Kinect titles. NPD reports that Kinect-related purchases accounted for 77 percent of total Microsoft sales in November. PS Move sales accounted for about 22 percent of Sony’s totals. Both Kinect and Move are motion-based add-ons meant to help the devices compete with the Wii. In the case of Kinect, it may be working. But despite a third place running for the last couple months, and a flurry of articles writing it off as dead, the Wii is showing resilience.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Jeffrey Van Camp

Former Digital Trends Contributor

As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…

Gaming

New PS Plus game lineup includes PS5 hits and ’90s classics

Spike sneak attacking an ape in Ape Escape 2.

PlayStation finally unveiled its starting lineup for its revamped PlayStation Plus service coming to consoles starting June 13. This new tiered membership is more in the vein of Xbox Game Pass and offers players an extensive catalog of PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and classic PlayStation titles depending on what plan is subscribed to.

This refurbishment of PlayStation Plus comes in the three tiers: Essential, extra, and premium/deluxe. These decide what add-ons and what titles one can access but each still comes with the standard Plus caveats such as playing online and getting the standard free monthly games.

Gaming

Why playing PS3 games on a PS5 is way harder than it sounds

A stack of PS3 games.

PlayStation Plus Premium will give players access to a library of classic PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 titles starting this June, which is exciting as the PS5 only is backward compatible with the PS4 currently. Unfortunately, it comes with a caveat: All PS3 games must be streamed from the cloud and can't be played natively on the console.
We're over 15 years removed from the PS3's launch, and there's still no good way to play many classic PS3 titles like Infamous or Metal Gear Solid 4 on modern platforms. Sony is content to continue PlayStation Now's approach to PS3 gaming with PlayStation Plus Premium. This stands out when Xbox and Nintendo are doing a relatively good job at natively emulating or remastering games from older systems for modern platforms.
To learn why PS3 games are so hard to bring to modern consoles, I spoke to Whatcookie, a contributor for the popular PS3 emulator RPCS3. Whatcookie, who chose not to share his name, is also known for creating a 60 frames per second patch for the PS3 version of Demon's Souls. He broke down what makes PS3 emulation particularly frustrating and sheds some light on why Sony is content with streaming PS3 games from the cloud instead.
CELL it
The system architectures of the PS4 and PS5 are so similar that isn't much of a problem to run PS4 titles on Sony's latest system, with a couple of exceptions. Compared to that, the PS3 has a different CPU that has more in common with the PS2 than Sony's modern systems.
In short, PS3's CELL microprocessor had some very unique capabilities, which meant that developers over-relied on the CPU at the time. This approach ultimately makes PS3 games harder to emulate. Whatcookie broke this all down for Digital Trends in greater detail.

"The Emotion Engine from the PS2 as well as the CELL in the PS3 are both built to do floating point math as fast as possible, to the detriment of other aspects of performance," Whatcookie explains. "The CELL even surpasses the PS4's CPU in terms of floating-point performance but loses out on every other measurable aspect of performance."
The uniquely powerful CPU of the PS3 already makes it an odd system, but the PS3 could also move 128 bytes atomically and had a weaker GPU than the Xbox 360. This combination led to a weird post-processing workaround for developers that Whatcookie called "unfriendly to emulation," where developers would offload post-processing to the CPU.
"This means moving a rendered image from the GPU over to main memory, emulating the post-processing code, and finally moving the image back to the GPU's memory from main memory, where the GPU will draw the UI over the processed image and finally present that image to the screen," Whatcookie says. "This type of round trip is very unfriendly to modern GPUs, where post-processing a 720p image would likely be faster than moving the image to main memory, never mind all the other steps."
These extra steps on a function that developers would usually contain to the GPU make emulation difficult. Still, a large dedicated team at RPCS3 has put in a lot of work to create a functional emulator for modern PCs. According to Whatcookie, it's totally possible to get PS3 emulation working on a PS5.
"The PS5's CPU is a decent deal faster, and combined with the kind of shortcuts that developers of commercial emulators make -- the official PS2 emulator on PS4 has many game-specific patches and hacks -- it should be possible to achieve full speed on whatever games they choose to release."
So why doesn't Sony put in the effort to address these issues and get proper PS3 emulation up and running on PS5?
Just because you can…

Computing

Nvidia RTX 3080 vs. Microsoft Xbox Series X vs. Sony PlayStation 5

nvidia rtx 3080 review 01

The next generation of gaming is upon us, and before the year’s end, there will be plenty of options with potent power for gamers to choose from. After Nvidia had unveiled its latest -- and most powerful consumer graphics card to date -- GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, the conversation has turned into a battle between PC gaming and console gaming.

Though we don't know all the details yet, it's an area where rival AMD will dominate with its silicon on Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s PlayStation 5.