December of 2010 might have been a great month for sales of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, but Microsoft’s surge in year-to-year console sales—42 percent—comes with its own price. According to the company, shortages of both the Xbox 360 and its Kinect accessory could be looming for those looking to pick up a post-holiday console.
Best Microsoft MCTS Training – Microsoft MCITP Training at Certkingdom.com
“In order to keep up with holiday demand in December for Xbox 360 and Kinect, Microsoft pulled units from its January and February production,” said a Microsoft spokesperson in an e-mail to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“Despite this, Microsoft still experienced out-of-supply situations in late December, and it expects supply constraint to continue in January and February as it works with retail and manufacturing partners to expedite production and shipments to replenish the channel,” added the anonymous informant.
But even though Microsoft’s 1.9 million Xbox 360 sales in December were the company’s largest ever for the console, Nintendo’s Wii was still able to overtake Microsoft’s device with 2.3 million units sold. Microsoft blames the aforementioned shortages for its inability to capture a seventh straight month on top of the console sales charts.
However, Microsoft’s Kinect for the Xbox 360 did manage to continue its own trend as the best-selling console accessory in December. That’s two months in a row at the top for the Kinect. And according to Microsoft, more than eight million Kinect units were sold within the device’s first 60 days on the market.
If anything, accessories are just about the only part of the home video gaming equation that are performing well in the market nowadays. Year-to-year hardware sales fell 13 percent between 2009 and 2010, according to NPD, and gaming sales themselves—including mobile games, PC games, and console games, amongst others—remained flat.
Gaming accessories, however, saw a 13 percent growth across the entire category between 2009 and 2010. And December 2010 alone was the largest month for accessories sales in the history of NPD’s data-tracking.