Microsoft exec on June NPD Xbox 360 Numbers

Whether you're calling it The Great Video Game Crash of 2009, or just another speed bump on the road to recovery, NPD Group's June 2009 retail games sales were a little unsettling. Only the Nintendo DS and Xbox 360 turned up positive year-over-year numbers, but what about attach rates? Game sales? Online downloads? Games slipping to 2010? Sony's presumed upcoming PlayStation 3 price cut? I spoke with Microsoft Xbox 360 and Live product manager Aaron Greenberg last night to get the lowdown.

The NPD data's out and it seems you and Nintendo were the only two platforms advancing down the field in hardware sales.

I think you've really got two stories here. There's the one most people are going to talk about, which is just the month of June, another month of NPD sales and such. It was definitely a good month for us. The Xbox 360 saw system sales grow 9 percent year-over-year with 241,000 systems sold and great performance on the game side. It tends to be a repeat of what we've seen month after month. I mean, June, as we know, is a pretty slow month. For us what's more interesting is that it's a great time to step back and look at the entire half-year's performance. For me that's much more interesting.

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Whether you're calling it The Great Video Game Crash of 2009, or just another speed bump on the road to recovery, NPD Group's June 2009 retail games sales were a little unsettling. Only the Nintendo DS and Xbox 360 turned up positive year-over-year numbers, but what about attach rates? Game sales? Online downloads? Games slipping to 2010? Sony's presumed upcoming PlayStation 3 price cut? I spoke with Microsoft Xbox 360 and Live product manager Aaron Greenberg last night to get the lowdown.

The NPD data's out and it seems you and Nintendo were the only two platforms advancing down the field in hardware sales.

I think you've really got two stories here. There's the one most people are going to talk about, which is just the month of June, another month of NPD sales and such. It was definitely a good month for us. The Xbox 360 saw system sales grow 9 percent year-over-year with 241,000 systems sold and great performance on the game side. It tends to be a repeat of what we've seen month after month. I mean, June, as we know, is a pretty slow month. For us what's more interesting is that it's a great time to step back and look at the entire half-year's performance. For me that's much more interesting.

So how did we perform over that six month period, how did that compare to the prior year, how are we doing relative to the competition when we match up side by side, and so on. As it turns out, it's a real bright spot for us. In fact the first six months of the year we saw consoles sales grow 20 percent year-over-year, despite the fact that we were the first console to launch this generation. That speaks well of what we offer in terms of content and pricing.

We're also talking Xbox Live performance. There's a lot of stuff that's tracked at retail with NPD, but we wanted to try to give people a sense of how we're performing on Xbox Live, and so for that same time period, January to June, we actually saw paid downloads jump 73 percent year-over-year. We're actually seeing online transactions grow at an even more rapid pace than retail sales.

What's your current attach rate [the number of games sold per Xbox 360] at retail?

Our attach rate was 8.6 in June, compared with 6.8 for PS3 and 6.4 for the Wii.

How about game sales? Growing? Flat? Declining? You had four top 10 charters this month, but you only listed hardware year-over-year figures in your NPD update.

I show that we had more game sales in June than any other platform, over $177 million in software sales. Year-over-year, our software sales were flat, but by comparison, Wii sales in June were down 30 percent and PS3 sales were down 19 percent.

How about downloads? NPD doesn't track them, and you're laying claim to a 73 percent growth figure for the first half of 2009. Is anyone independently verifying that number?

I think at this point...I mean yeah, NPD is only tracking the retail stuff. I don't know what the future will hold for that space. I know that we've been pretty open about wanting to share that sort of information. The fact is that...yeah, it is what it is. It's taking our actual paid downloads for the first half of the year and comparing them to last year. Our Live membership has grown over the same period of time. We're at 20 million now, versus where we were a year ago. We continue to see more people go online, more content arrive, and I think that if you look at all the big DLC packs this year, from Fallout to Fable to the GTA episodes, I think that stuff really helped along with the lower price points.

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