Archive notice: This article was originally published on December 18, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The US video game industry had a record year in 2007. Sales figures for video game hardware, software and accessories had already reached a value of 2.63 billion US dollars in November of this year, corresponding to an increase of 52 percent compared with the same month of the previous year.
According to pressetext, video game products worth 13.1 billion US dollars have already been sold in total this year. The video game industry has thus set a new record, even though December, traditionally the industry’s strongest sales month, is still to come.
“Above all, the good business in November and the early Thanksgiving holiday helped the video game industry generate revenue of 18 to 19 billion US dollars this year”, explains NPD analyst Anita Frazier.
Even if 2007 had ended on the first of December, the industry would still have recorded an income increase of five percent over the previous year, Frazier says. The previous record value of 12.5 billion US dollars for 2006 is therefore already history. The software sector in particular was responsible for the outstanding balance sheet. Here, revenue of 1.1 million US dollars was generated in November of this year alone.
But the video game industry was also very successful in hardware sales in 2007. Along with price cuts for Sony’s Playstation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, sales figures for stationary consoles rose to 771 million US dollars in November and those for portable devices to 319 million US dollars. Nintendo’s Wii console was particularly in demand. The Japanese corporation started the US Christmas business with a record: almost one million devices crossed US shop counters last month. Most recently, the enormous demand for the Wii even led to supply shortages.
Microsoft can also be pleased about the Xbox 360’s second-best sales month, with 770,000 units sold. Sony sold 466,000 Playstation 3 devices, corresponding to an increase of 285 percent compared with the previous month of October.
