Xbox 360 and the game market, nine months later

Over at Seattle PI, again, Todd Bishop has celebrated the 9-month anniversary of the Xbox 360 by looking at how sales of games have changed.

He's done this by adding together the sales of a handful of games publishers who break out results by console, so it's not a proper market survey. However, it does include EA, the industry giant, so it's probably a good sign of which way the wind is blowing.

The result is not a surprise. Basically, the Xbox share of the market has increased, at the expense of the PS2 and GameCube. But not by much. As Bishop says:

You can literally see the user base shifting from the original Xbox to the Xbox 360, with the two Microsoft consoles basically splitting the sales volume that was associated with the original Xbox in the previous year. This appears to support the conventional wisdom that much of the Xbox 360's initial market would come from existing Xbox users who upgrade to the new console. The question here is how many new gamers and PS2 users the Xbox 360 will be able to attract in the long run.

Nintendo fans will note that the GameCube looks horribly weak -- and, indeed, it is. However, the sums don't include first party games published by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Both the Sony and Microsoft numbers will be hit by this, but I expect the Nintendo numbers suffered even more.

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