A new Nintendo console is on the market this Christmas for the first time in eight years, but that apparently wasn’t enough to juice overall hardware sales. According to the latest data, last month was the worst November for new video game hardware sales in the U.S. since 1995, the year the original PlayStation launched here.
Circana’s Mat Piscatella reports that only 1.6 million new consoles were sold last month, including during Black Friday. That’s just a few hundred thousand more than the 1995 low of 1.4 million. Perhaps just as surprisingly, the Switch 2 wasn’t even the best-selling hardware in November. That honor went to the PS5, a console that’s five years old and ended up not benefiting from the expected Grand Theft Auto 6 launch hype this year.
Part of that no doubt came down to a discrepancy in Black Friday deals. Sony was aggressively discounting the all-digital PS5 by $100 while Nintendo actually got rid of its long-standing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe bundle for the original Switch. The Switch 2 did end up getting some surprise discounts from retailers by Cyber Monday, but that ended up falling on December 1 this year, so it doesn’t fall within this period.
Piscatella reports that the average price of a new console “reached an all-time November high of $439, up 11 percent compared to a year ago.” Back in November 2019 the average was just $235. That’s partly the impact from President Trump’s trade war which led Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft to all implement multiple rounds of price increases in 2025. A new Xbox Series X, first released five years ago for $500, now costs $650 at Best Buy.
Microsoft was also notable for being the only hardware manufacturer not to discount its consoles at all during the holiday season. It’s almost as if the company’s been trying not to sell new hardware, encouraging players instead to play its games in the cloud or on rival platforms. The Xbox ended up coming in third for the month, even as Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 launched as November’s best-selling game (it will likely still remain behind Battlefield 6 for the year, however).
Is console gaming just getting too expensive? Is the floor secretly falling out from under the U.S. economy? Why not both, Piscatella suggested. “Correlation does not necessarily imply causation…unless it does,” he wrote when speculating about the drop-off in console sales. With Roblox free and Fortnite back on phones, it’s never been easier for parents to look at the $500 sticker price for a new system and say, “no thanks.”
