US Console Sales Just Hit a 13-Year August Low

Americans bought 559,000 consoles in August. That's the smallest August haul since 2013, when the number was 423,000, back when everyone was holding onto their cash for a PS4 or an Xbox One a few months out. According to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, hardware sales dropped 15% year over year, and nobody came out of it clean: PlayStation unit sales fell 11%, Xbox fell 31% (its worst August since 2020), and Nintendo dropped 15%, as GameSpot reported.

Here's the part that should make you grind your teeth a little. The average price of a console climbed from $476 last year to $541 this year. Fewer boxes went out the door, and each one cost more. Blame the $900 PS5 Pro, blame parts shortages, blame whatever earnings call buzzword you want. The result for Sony specifically is that unit sales dropped 11% but dollar sales actually grew 17%, because people buying consoles at all are buying the expensive versions. That's not a comeback. That's a company getting paid more to sell less.

There's a reason this generation looks nothing like 2013. Back then, gamers were sitting on their wallets because a new PS4 and Xbox One were a month away. Nobody is doing that now. No successor hardware has even been announced for PS5 or Xbox Series X|S, and six years in, the people who wanted one probably already have one. Add in a round of price hikes earlier this year that pulled a bunch of buyers forward to beat the increase, and you've drained the exact demand that would've shown up this summer. The machines aren't selling because the machines already sold, months ago, to the people in a hurry.

Games told a different story. NBA 2K27 topped August and sits third for the year so far, with Madden NFL 27 right behind it. Elden Ring jumped from 41st in July to seventh in August on the back of its Switch 2 port, proof that a good port still moves copies years after launch. Physical software spending is actually up 5% year to date to $738 million, though that number is doing some lifting: spending on Switch 2 Game-Key Card releases rocketed 631%, masking a continued decline in traditional discs and cartridges that nobody should mistake for a comeback either.

Zoom out and the bigger number is uglier. Total content spending fell 10% year over year to $3.8 billion, pulling the year-to-date total down 2% to $32.2 billion. Mobile took the worst hit, down 18%. Console spending slid 7%. PC, somehow, grew 13%, with subscriptions up 3% on top of it. People are still spending money on games. They're just increasingly doing it on the one platform nobody built a $900 Pro model for.

Charge more for the box, sell fewer boxes, and call the dollar figure a win if it helps the quarterly call go smoother. Just don't call it a healthy market. It's a tired one, pretending the math still adds up the old way.