Home consoles below expectations, portables in line

March console sales were released by NPD yesterday and the results disappointed expectations of both Wall Street analysts and the simExchange video game prediction market.

Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian had predicted March sales in the US to be flat with February, which were 335,000 units for Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii, 127,000 units for Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3, and 228,000 for Microsoft Corp’s Xbox 360. On the other side, Michael Pachter was expecting growth in March, forecasting 400,000 units for Wii sales, 165,000 units for PS3 sales, and 250,000 units for Xbox 360 sales at in the US. Pachter also predicted the Nintendo DS to sell 250,000 units and the PSP to sell 210,000 units.

Trading on the simExchange the night before NPD’s release had instead pointed to slight growth over February, expecting Wii sales of 385,000 units, PS3 sales at 144,000 units, and Xbox 360 sales at 231,000 units. The simExchange also forecasted 492,800 units for the Nintendo DS and 180,500 units for the PlayStation Portable. The simExchange appeared to share the analysts’ overly bullish forecast on the home consoles, but appeared to be very close on the portable consoles, off 2.9% on the DS sales and less than 1% on the PSP sales.

Although PS3 sales slightly missed the market’s expectations with just 130k units sold, PS3 shares were only down 0.13% to 5,706.13 DKP (forecasts 57.06 million units globally) as traders believe the console’s true growth story is still intact.

Xbox 360 shares declined 0.74% to 5,347.83 DKP (forecasts 53.47 million units globally) following the console’s 32,000-unit miss.

The Nintendo Wii actually closed 3.89% higher to 7,122.76 DKP (forecasts 71.23 million units globally) as traders dismissed the system’s unexpected low sales to supply constraints that do not affect the long-term demand story.

The Nintendo DS rose 1.75% to predicting 84.26 million units sold globally while the PSP shaved off 0.70% to predicting 37.67 million units sold globally.