We’re heading into the home stretch when it comes to retail sales and folks – the video game industry is hot. According to this blog posting over at the NY Times, domestic sales of video game consoles, hardware, software, and accessories hit $10.5 billion for the first 10 months of 2007! According to NPD’s Anita Frazier, “This year’s sales have already achieved the annual sales number for 2005 and the two biggest months are yet to come”

The hottest selling game title for a single console in October was not surprisingly Halo 3 for the Microsoft Xbox 360. For the month of October, 433,000 units of Halo 3 were sold. Overall though – the hottest title by far is Guitar Hero III. The game sold 383,000 units for the Xbox 360, 286,000 units for the Nintendo Wii, and 271,000 units for the Sony PlayStation 2. For the year, Activision has sold 1.4 million units of Guitar Hero III, and 2.8 million units of GHII. That’s sick folks.

While video game sales are certainly strong, there’s one console that’s been left in the dark thus far and that would be the Sony PlayStation 3. Sales numbers continue to lag for the PS3. For the month of October, Sony sold a mere 121,000 units of the PS3 console while Microsoft sold 366,00 units of the Xbox 360 and Nintendo sold 519,000 units of the Wii. The PS3 was even outsold by it’s older brethren – the Sony PlayStation 2 as that console sold 184,000 units.

What the PS3 needs is a game title to really propel sales. Sure the new price cuts are good but no one will come if the content isn’t there. At this point, it’s hard not to look at the PS3 as simply a Blu-ray player that happens to also play some games. Now remove backwards compatibility with older PS2 games and there’s even less reason for anyone to buy the PS3.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Sony, PlayStation 3, PS3, Sales