Analyst: 360 to rival Wii sales in December

Last week, retailers rejoiced as the day-after-Thanksgiving holiday sale known as "Black Friday" ushered in the arrival of the holiday shopping season. While industry-tracking group NPD won't release its official sales statistics until next week, the big-three console makers--Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft--have already issued preliminary reports claiming massive spikes in Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 hardware sales for the last week of November.

In a monthly newsletter to investors today, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter addressed the recent hardware sales spike and its implications for the console race during this holiday season.

"While next generation hardware unit sales are more modest than they were in the analogous period of 2002 (when console prices averaged under $200), recent price cuts and new hardware (slim PlayStation Portable and the 40Gb PS3) and the release of key games (Halo 3 and Guitar Hero III) triggered a spike in hardware sales over the last few months that we believe will continue over the remainder of the year," said Pachter, referencing Nintendo and Microsoft's sales claims of 350,000 Wiis and 310,000 Xbox 360s for the week. Because Sony gave no direct figures for the week, Pachter estimated the PlayStation 3s unit sales for the week to be between 150,000 and 200,000.

Pachter also took a stab at how the last month of the console race will play out. "These figures imply that Microsoft will sell 1.5 million Xbox 360s in December in the US, that Nintendo will sell 1.7 million Wiis, and that Sony will sell around 800,000 PS3s," he said. "This is about double the number of consoles sold last December and suggests that the holiday will be a good one for the US publishers."

One other factor Pachter mentions that bodes well for publishers is that the PlayStation 2 is proving to have longer legs than previously anticipated. "We continue to believe that better-than-expected PS2 software sales this year (down only 24 percent year-to-date compared to our forecast of down 32 percent) will drive overall growth well into next year, and we expect next-generation console software sales growth to highly correlate to any increase in the rate of PS2 software sales decline," he said.