Analyst: February NPS Sales Will Be Down 6 Percent

Michael Pachter, the analyst that watches the video game industry for securities firm Wedbush Morgan, has said that he expects February to be another pretty bad month of gaming, with the market going down in value by about 6 percent when compared to the same period in 2010, making it the third consecutive month of decline on the United States video game market.

The overall value of sales will likely arrive to around 595 million dollars, with software again being the biggest seller for the month.

Pachter says that the Xbox 360 from Microsoft will likely be the best-selling console of the month, managing to beat both the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Nintendo Wii because of big demand for the Kinect motion tracking system.

Pachter believes the console will sell 385,000 units in February and that Microsoft will continue to take the numbers as a sign that its platform is now leading the current hardware generation.

The analyst says that the PS3 will move 310,000 units while the Nintendo home console will likely sell 305,000 units, continuing its long decline.

The biggest sellers of the month in the video game space are set to be Marvel vs. Capcom 3: The Fate of Two Worlds from Capcom and the first-person shooter Killzone 3 from Sony and developer Guerrilla Games.

February is traditionally a rather quiet month when it comes to video gaming, but as publishers are trying to spread their biggest releases as wide as possible over the calendar year big games like Killzone 3 are now scheduled for launch in this interval.

It's unlikely that March will again be a month of decline as the United States finally gets the launch of the Nintendo 3DS handheld, which delivers full three-dimensional gaming experiences without glasses.

A number of big titles, like Dragon Age 2, Homefront, Total War: Shogun 2 and Pokemon Black and White are being launch during the month of March.