Sony chose to focus on the momentum of its sales, peppering growth rates into its press release along the lines of: “from January to November 2008, more than 2.8 million PS3s have been sold in the US, representing a year-to-date hardware sales growth of more than 60%.”
The company explained that the PS3 was enjoying “strong momentum” during the holiday season as 378,071 PS3 consoles were sold in November, “representing an increase of almost 100% from October”.
What Sony didn’t touch on, understandably, is that its three systems were sitting at the bottom of the NPD hardware charts. Sony elected to group together the sales figures of the PS2, PSP and PS3 to allow a far stronger impression, with the company flaunting Playstation Brand US sales hitting over 1 million.
Sony suffixed this claim with growth figures from the previous month (93 percent up).
More considerable was the month-on-month growth of the PSP, which more than doubled its turnover for November with 420,539 units sold. “This represents an increase of 118% from October.” Sony added that sales of the PlayStation 2 rose slightly from 190k to 206k.
In terms of revenue, all three PS systems had generated over $261 million in November, with software providing $352 million. The company declined to mention profits, though did include a rather ambiguous notice in its release: “Year-to-date (Jan-Nov), the PlayStation brand generated more than 5 billion in revenue, representing an 11% growth year-to-date.”
Sony seemed encouraged by software sale performances, claiming that some 3.5 million PS3 games had been sold in November. The company stated that Activision’s Call of Duty: World at War, Midway’s newest Mortal Kombat and EA’s Madden NFL 09 were some of the best-selling games for the platform. Sony had separated comparisons between these games and its own exclusive software, stating that the “top-selling exclusive games” for the PS3 in November were Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet.
Finally, Sony noted 15 million registered PlayStation Network accounts, though it didn’t provide growth figures for the month.