PS4 Wins April NPD Sales Xbots on Suicide Watch LMAO HD

http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/12/april-2016-npd-dark-souls-iii-ratchet-clank-lead-as-gaming-industry-drops-15/ https://twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/730898912786055169 April had a pair of hugely successful launches in Dark Souls III and Ratchet & Clank, but NPD analyst Liam Callahan points out that 2016’s games didn’t before nearly as well as the games from the same period in 2015. “New Physical Software declined in April 2016 due to a few factors: poor comparisons to last year’s new releases, and the poor performance of March launches in April compared to last year,” said Callahan. “Despite some record-breaking new launches, there were poor comparisons to the release of Mortal Kombat X in April 2015. Mortal Kombat X was a strong launch last year — its April 2015 sales exceeded that of the entirety of all April 2016 new launches by 18 percent.” So nothing got gamers quite as excited for this April as Mortal Kombat did last year. Additionally, March 2016 sales didn’t carry their momentum through to the following month. “Given the strength of March 2016 launches and how they lifted sales over March 2015, it was surprising to see the dollar sales performance drop by 16 percent compared to sales of March launches last April,” said Callahan. When it comes to hardware, however, the industry is still seeing a big decline due to the plummeting average sale price of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. “Hardware sales declined 23 percent compared to April 2015, with the majority of the decline due to a 19 percent or $30.4 million decline in console hardware sales,” said Callahan. “Compared to last year, dollar spending for [current-generation] consoles decreased by 15 percent with an over 70 percent decline in [last-generation] consoles. Portables also dropped by $11.3 million in sales over last April.” At the same time, this is not a red alert for console gaming. Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are still trending 40 percent higher than the cumulative sales after the same 30-month period compared to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. NPD only tracks a small part of a larger gaming industry. It doesn’t include digital games, hardware sold outside of the U.S., or second-hand shops. That means it is best to use this data as a snapshot of a massive, more dynamic market. But, as always, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo pay for this data, and they likely use it to make forward-looking decisions.