The NPD Group have released their official US gaming sales data for October 2015, a month which saw the release of the Xbox One’s biggest exclusive yet, Halo 5: Guardians. However, while 343 Industries’ latest entry in the series topped the sales chart for October, which is an impressive (though not exactly unexpected) feat given that it launched at the tail-end of the month, it still failed to significantly drive home sales for Microsoft’s console.
NPD no longer releases specific sales numbers for consoles, though reading between the lines and statements from Microsoft and Sony reveals more information regarding the amount of hardware sales pulled in by both companies. Though the Xbox One surpassed the PS4 as the best-selling console for the month of October, the company reported that they had experienced an 81% increase in sales of the Xbox One console in comparison with the sales they achieved in October 2014. This would mean that they sold just 305,000 Xbox One units, as noted by Twitter user ZhugeEX.
Compare these results with the NPD sales data released in September 2007, a month which saw the release of Halo 3, in which Microsoft released a statement highlighting that sales of the Xbox 360 had “more than doubled” compared to the weekly average of sales made before the release of the game. With the Xbox 360 having shifted 277,000 units in the US in August 2007, this would mean that the number of Xbox 360 sales for September of that year would come in at over 550,000, though NPD placed the figure at the 527,800 mark.
It should be noted that Halo 5 released at the tail-end of the month on October 27th, but then again, so did Halo 3 back in 2007 with its September 24th release date. With online pre-orders now also taking up a huge portion of sales, it’s likely that the number of those who purchased an Xbox One in order to play Halo 5 wouldn’t have altered too dramatically even if it had been released a week earlier.
Halo: Reach also garnered the Xbox 360 more sales, with 483,989 units being shifted in its 2010 release month. Halo 4 then helped carry the Xbox 360 to a mammoth 1.26 million units sold in November 2012, though this was also bolstered by the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
By comparison, the sales data for last month indicates that Halo 5 managed to shift fewer Xbox One consoles than Titanfall, with 311,000 Xbox One units having been sold in that game’s release month of March 2014.
This reveals that both consoles have suffered a surprisingly poor month when taking into account that it saw the launch of both Microsoft’s biggest exclusive yet, and a significant PS4 price cut from Sony. With NPD reporting that overall hardware sales increased by a paltry 3% in comparison with October 2014, and software sales an even small rise by a meager 2%, in terms of sales neither company has much to brag about heading into the holiday season.
