November 2014 NPD: Xbox One Defeats PS4, Call of Duty is #1

Update:

It turns out the NPD report for November 2014 wasn’t entirely accurate, prompting Executive Director David Riley to send out this statement:

After The NPD Group released the November 2014 video games sales report, we discovered a minor issue with the data. While the overall impact is minimal, we want to provide you with the most accurate data possible. For overall video games hardware and video games software, the impact is no more than +/- 1% (rounded). Video games accessories were not impacted.

For the Top 10 software titles, there were shifts in ranks of some titles, but no title has been pushed out from the Top 10 we released on Dec. 11.

We’ve update the original story with these new figures, which includes overall industry sales up from $2.41 billion to $2.42 billion, hardware dropping from $1.10 billion to $1.02 billion, and Assassin’s Creed Unity jumping from #9 to #5.

Updated Original Story:

No doubt thanks to its holiday price cut, Microsoft confirmed that the Xbox One managed to defeat the PlayStation 4 in the United States (and UK) during November 2014, and was the overall best-selling console throughout the month as well. This snaps the PS4’s 10-month winning streak.

As for the financial results, the NPD says total industry sales were down 11% compared to November 2013, finishing at $2.42 billion. For a breakdown of categories, hardware was at $1.02 billion (down 22%), software (including PC) was $1.09 billion (down 1%), and accessories were up 2% to $331.2 million.

NPD analyst Liam Callahan talked about the November 2014 results:

For the most part throughout 2014, we have seen software declines that were offset by year-over-year increases in hardware spending. This November, however, hardware declines totaled $294 million while software declined $17 million or 2 percent. Accessory sales increased by a modest $5 million.

So far this year, industry sales are up 2% compared to last year, with hardware bundles a major factor in terms of hardware sales. Callahan adds that combined sales of the PS4 and Xbox One to date are nearly 80% higher than combined PS3 and Xbox 360 sales after 13 months.

Here’s the top 10 selling games in November 2014 (here’s October 2014), which totals retail sales across all systems and includes Collectors Editions, GOTY Editions, and bundles, but not those bundled with hardware (sales by platform are ranked in brackets from highest-selling to least-selling):