Gaming industry makes $3 billion in November 2011

November has been a golden month for the gaming industry according to the data released by the consumer market research firm NPD, showing a total of approximately $3 billion from sales.

This is to be expected, November did see Black Friday for one thing, but also the release of some big titles. The big names of the list are Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Out of the three billion dollars, there is more or less 58% attributed to software sales, which is up by 16% compared to last year. Hardware sales, on the other hand, are down by 9% due to the slowing sales of the Wii console, same goes for accessory which is down by 34% compared to November 2010. Right after the NPD numbers were released, Microsoft stated that it sold about 1.7 million consoles in November with 60% of these from Black Friday.

In the top five we have Activision’s Modern Warfare 3, Bethesda Softworks’ Skyrim, following closely is Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3 and two Ubisoft games, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Just Dance 3.

Other titles have seen successful sales as well, such as sports franchise Madden NFL 12, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Saints Row: The Third, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword as well as Batman: Arkham City.

According to NPD, Bethesda Softworks came close of matching lifetime sales of Oblivion with Skyrim sales behind by just half a million units. The same can be said with Batman: Arkham City, with just two months of sales, it came close to matching Arkham Asylum’s lifetime sales figure.

In a related story, Raptr, the gaming social network, posted that Skyrim is the most played game of 2011, and this only after four weeks of release. Modern Warfare 3 has the most total amounts of hours of playtime, but that’s mostly due to the large amount of sales, as the average Skyrim player has about 23.5 hours of playtime in the game with average gaming session running as long as three hours.

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