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Microsoft hails music games success

Publisher notes Xbox 360 as "preferred stage" for Rock Band and Guitar Hero

Microsoft has responded to the NPD sales results in the US for November by hailing the company's success in the music games genre, both in terms of units sold and also for tracks downloaded.

According to a statement Microsoft has labelled its Xbox 360 platform as the "preferred stage" for games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero, noting that Xbox Live has "delivered more than 80 per cent of the downloadable songs for music games, currently averaging 3.8 million music downloads per month," making a total of 45 million music files to-date.

Additionally the Xbox 360 has sold almost 2 million copies of Rock Band in the US market so far, a figure that Microsoft points out is "almost 1 million more than the competition combined," while life-to-date sales have passed the 4 million mark, which represents over 50 per cent of the franchise sales "this generation" - in other words, not including the success of the games on the PlayStation 2.

The publisher also pointed out that Rock Band 2 sold 363,000 units on the Xbox 360 since launch on September 14, a performance which helped the platform generate USD 167 million in third party revenue.

The full breakdown of hardware and software sales in the NPD September results is available now.