Game Industry's Sixth Month NPD Drop Has Silver Lining

XBOX

PS3

Portables

Hot Sites: Diablo 3 : Guild Wars 2 : RPGReporter

Game Industry's Sixth Month NPD Drop Has Silver Lining

11 Sep 2009 at 13:06:39 by Gunnar Petzall

As expected, the U.S. console retail business has declined, making August the sixth straight month of year-on-year sales drop, despite bettering July's numbers.

The overall decline was 16 percent down to £544.01 GBP million ($908.72 USD million) but many analysts are expecting better sales figures for the reminder of 2009. The reasoning behind this expectation is that many strong titles are due for release, but NPD's Anita Frazier warned of having a too positive outlook since "the back four months of the year would have to be up 14% in aggregate for 2009 to come in flat in comparison to 2008 sales." Translated, a 14 percent deficit would need to be met.

Hardware sales dropped even further, down 25 percent to £178.16 GBP million ($297.6 USD million) but Microsoft's and Sony's price cuts seem to be improving sales month on month since announced, and they're almost neck-and-neck with 215.400 and 210.000 units respectively sold in the US. Wii is still way ahead with 277.400 units sold.

DS has also been winning sales with 552.900 units shifted compared to 140.300 PSPs and 105.900 PS2 units.

Fraizer commented that slight sales improvement over the last months could help bring the market back to form.

"[T]he price cuts implemented on the PS3 and 360 hardware already made an impact on unit sales, despite having been executed fairly late in the month. It will be interesting to see the full impact of the new price points on September sales." We will also find it very interesting to see how the new slim PS3s will fare in September, especially as this has been the determining factor for sales since its release.

While sales are not as good as last year, all formats performed better than in July.

"There is a lot of speculation about Wii and whether Nintendo will take a price cut as sales comps to last year show declines," Frazier said. "I do think it's interesting to note that the Wii is still selling at levels comparable to what the PS2 was doing at about this point in its lifecycle."

Games sales were also down, a total of 15 percent year-over-year to £281.55 GBP million ($470.3 USD million) where PS3 became the only platform with an overall gain.

EA's Madden NFL 10 was expected to be the big winner for August, and had three versions in the top ten. Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Asylum also debuted with its two console versions in fairly close proximity, Xbox 360 leading by only 13,000 units.

The full Top 10 list for retail console games for August 2009 in the U.S. is: