On Thursday, the NPD Group announced that revenues for the overall U.S. retail game industry in April 2013 were 25 percent less than they were for the same period a year ago. Microsoft also announced that it sold 130,000 Xbox 360 consoles for the month of April in the U.S., which was over 100,000 units less than what was sold in April 2012.
However, Microsoft is now making the case that the overall game industry is actually doing pretty well. Today, only four days away from the official reveal of its next Xbox console, Microsoft released new statistics concerning the overall game industry, based on its own data as well as those from third party research firms.
In a post on Microsoft's newly launched Xbox Wire blog, the company says that for 2012, a whopping $65 billion was spend on games worldwide. $27 billion was spent on console games, with another $12 billion on PC gaming. It also claims that for the current generation of consoles (Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii) the install base 238 million units, compared to 173 million for the last generation (Xbox, PS2 and GameCube).
Microsoft says that the natural decline for console sales in the eight year of their lives was just 19 percent for the current generation, versus a 26 percent decline for year eight in the last console generation. Finally, Microsoft claims that sales estimates for the upcoming next generation of consoles are showing that the industry will sell 385 million units worldwide by its eight year, a 28 percent increase compared to the current generation.
Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft
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