Gamasutra posted the NPD sales figures for November just yesterday and the numbers tell a very interesting story. Of course the DS and Wii sold like hotcakes, that is completely expected and irrelevant from what I saw in the numbers. I want to focus solely on the PS3 and Xbox 360 sales, both hardware and software.

The Xbox 360 sold 819.5k while the PS3 sold 710.4K giving the 360 an advantage in hardware sales for the first time in 3 months, though not by much. When looking year-over-year 360 sales barely dropped where the PS3 say an 88% increase in sales.

Unfortunately Sony doesn’t fare so well on the software side of things, but this is to be expected. When you look at the top 10 games on the NPD list, the 360 software outsells PS3 software by more than 2.5:1. But what do these numbers mean?

Let me start off by comparing Halo 3 with Modern Warfare 2 just on the Xbox 360. During the same time period from release day MW2 is outselling Halo 3. Aside from the gaming being great and any marketing leading up to release, the game has benefited from the Xbox 360 having a significantly higher install base at time of release when compared to when Halo 3 hit store shelves.

This is the reason why Microsoft is doing so well in software in general right now. They have the install base of systems in the home and that translates into software sales as we see in November and will see in December as well. As noted earlier, hardware sales have only dropped a minuscule amount which is all the more impressive and beneficial to Microsoft as they continue to steadily increase their hardware install base.

For the first time this generation I can finally say that Sony is getting things right. The timing of the PS3 Slim was as close to perfect as you could hope for. Sony stole the attention away from Microsoft and the PS3 quickly began to sell like hotcakes. Then Uncharted 2 dropped in October which got rave reviews which continued to keep attention on the PS3.

The fact that software sales are lower on PS3 in November isn’t such a dreadful thing for Sony. Right now they are focusing on hardware sales to get as many systems into homes before God of War 3, Gran Turismo 5, and Final Fantasy XIII all hit store shelves early next year.