Picture
The video game industry has been soft the past 16 months or so, with sales pretty much down across the board, save for a few standouts (the new Xbox 360 Slim, for example). The NPD Group has released their sales numbers for last month, and its more bad news for the industry. NPD is reporting an over 20% decrease in sales from last year, with the industry losing almost $204 million last month.



Software (new games themselves) got hit the hardest. They sold $402.1 million last year, but dropped 24% to $264.8 million this year. Despite a price drop on the Nintendo 3DS and a price cut on the PlayStation 3, new hardware sales didn’t fare any better, losing 12%, dropping from $283.4 million to $249.4 million. Finally, video game accessory sales were hit the least, losing just 1% of sales, dropping to $134.7 million.

The monthly NPD report, NPD analyst Anita Frazier writes (according BGR) that the big gap in US video game sales can be attributed to EA moving the annual release window for Madden NFL from August to September.

The Xbox 360 was the bestselling console in the United States once again. That’s the seventh straight month of the Xbox being on top, and it’s pretty much had a lock on that spot since the new Xbox 360 Slim was announced last June at E3. The bestselling title was Deus Ex: Human Revolution – a fine game. The big EA Sports title, NCAA Football 12 came in second. Good news for EA regarding that franchise, as we just reported, they recently won a landmark legal casesaying they had to the right to use facsimile characters of college players in their games.




Leave a Reply.