Game Sales Down Again

The 360 still leads... the Wii is hanging in at #2, but that's with a $100 price advantage.

This isn't exactly the way NPD cares to announce it, but game sales continued to drop in February. At least, traditional game sales dropped 8% over last year. Sure, overall sales were up 3%, but to get there you had to add in sales of Kinect and Move which are still doing quite well. If you're just looking at software, the picture continues to be grim.

Hardware sales were up 10%, and the PS3 was up 12%. Happy times for hardware... but software is just not catching up. I'd guess that Xbox Live and PSN are doing a good business in digital sales, which aren't captured by NPD (of course).

NPD tries to put a happy face on things, but I don't think this report should be cause for happy dances in the console games business. Fortunately, mobile, social, and other forms of game revenue continue to do well. NPD intends to report regularly on those things, but so far any of their reports are mostly speculation since digital revenue goes largely unreported in public.

NPD continues to become less relevant as game industry revenue moves more and more online and out of retail stores. What will replace them?