It's a little good, a little bad with this year's November 2011 NPD results. While "unit sales grew for console hardware, as well as console, portable, and PC software," NPD analyst Anita Frazier warns that "a decline in average retail price in all categories" besides portable hardware resulted in dollar sales that were flat compared to last November. That said, November 2011 "marks the best November on record for sales of new physical content," besting the previous record holder, November 2008.

Unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 was the top selling piece of gear for the month and Frazier notes that the "gap between 360 sales and sales of the next best selling platform was the largest we've seen since December 2008 when the Nintendo DS was the top selling system." For the month, Nintendo announced it sold more than 860,000 Wii systems, more than 795,000 Nintendo 3DS systems and more than 350,000 Nintendo DS systems.

In the software arena, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 took its perch at the top of the charts, besting Black Ops "by about 7%," while Skyrim managed "a five-fold increase over Oblivion's first month sales" coming in just a half-million units short of matching its predecessor's lifetime sales. Other newcomers include single SKU exclusives like Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception in seventh place and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword in ninth.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/09/no...-mw3-and-skyr/