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It would appear like all three game hardware manufacturers saw a better than expected sales performance during Thanksgiving week in U.S. Price cut announced by all three vendors in recent past seems to have given a much needed boost to hardware sales.
Contrary to beliefs held by some naysayers, Nintendo lead the purchasing blitz with over 1.4 million units sold across all three devices— Wii, DS and DSi. According to internal sales numbers released by Nintendo, this week saw sale of more than 550,000 Wii units at the new SRP of $199.99. Between November 22 and November 28 this year, Nintendo claims to have sold over a million hand-held units, breaking previous (Thanksgiving week) record held by Nintendo’s own Game Boy Advance. Nintendo went on to boast that these sales figures translate to 150 Nintendo systems sold every minute or more than 2.5 units every second.
Microsoft also claimed a very positive Thanksgiving week with their sales figure seeing a jump of 100% compared to the prior week. Along with price-drops, Microsoft spokesman David Dennis attributed the success story to aggressive bundling by key American retailers like Best Buy and Walmart. It is reported that Walmart is bundling the lowest priced ($199) X360 SKU— the Xbox 360Arcade units— with a $100 Walmart gift cards. Similarly, Best Buy is said to have bundled Xbox 360 Elite unit with a total of six games. This was further compounded with recently available bundle of Xbox 360 Elite units with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. However, exact sales numbers were not offered by Microsoft.
Not wanting to be the one to be left behind, Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold was equally upbeat about sales performance of PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable throughout the week. He claimed that “key retailers (showed) a significant increase” for the two gaming platforms; whereas demand for PlayStation 3 “was at an all time high with the system selling more than 440,000 units for the week ending 29th November”.