Last April has been a historic month for the video game industry in the United States . As we discussed this afternoon with the game sales data for the month in the US , the video game market has experienced explosive growth in a month marked by confinement and sanitary measures, where total revenues (software and hardware) have increased by 73% compared to April 2019. But that is not the most impressive thing that the NPD Group report has revealed , and that is that hardware sales have shot up completely during the last month.
According to the analyst firm, console sales in the United States grew by 163% during the month of April, compared to the previous year’s figures for that month. And this is not a misprint. 163%, much more than double the sales of 2019 despite the proximity of the new generation . In total, sales of Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One generated $ 420 million in the past month, which is also the best figure in the last 12 years , since 427 million were recorded in April 2008.
At the beginning of 2020, the sales of consoles in the US experienced a sharp drop pending the new consoles, with figures lower than those of 2019 in both January and February. However, the large figures for March , combined with the spectacular growth in April, have boosted hardware sales in 2020 to 1.2 billion dollars so far this year, 30% higher than in 2019.
If we talk about the platforms in particular, Nintendo Switch has returned to be the best-selling console of the month, where its high demand and the shortage of units led Nintendo to increase the production of the console in early April. In this sense, the sales of the Switch from January to April 2020 are the highest figures of any console in the history of the United States , above those of the Nintendo Wii in the same period of 2009.
In recent weeks there has been a lot of talk about the future of the hybrid console, where Nintendo assured that Switch is still in the middle of its life span , and that it has a few years ahead of it. Something that endorse the great results that the console accumulates in these months. The president of the Big N also affirmed that there are many games to announce for this year , although for the coming periods, our newsroom has already debated the future of the console. Is Switch ready to last 3 more years in the market?
