The NPD Group is set to launch its figures for the United States video game hardware market at the end of this week, with the month of March taking center stage, and a number of analysts are predicting a worse situation than that for the same month in 2010.
Michael Pachter, the outspoken analyst with Wedbush Morgan, has said that he expects to see software sales go down by no less than 8 percent, reaching 800 million dollars.
The best performer of the month will be the twin launch of
Pokemon Black and White, which have combined their creature powers to reach 1.4 million, with both Dragon Age 2, the role-playing game from BioWare, and Crysis 2, the first-person shooter from Crytek, coming in second and third places with sales of about 400,000 copies each.
Other strong performers will include Homefront, despite the rather negative reviews.
In March 2010 the biggest launches were God of War III, a PlayStation 3 exclusive, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, a first-person shooter, and Final Fantasy XIII, a Japanese role-playing game.
Pachter also believes that the
Nintendo 3DS will be the best-selling piece of hardware, followed by the Xbox 360 from Microsoft, which will grow to about 480,000 units sold, and the Nintendo Wii, coming in at 410,000 consoles.
The PlayStation 3 is estimated to have sold 380,000 devices during March.
Colin Sebastian, from Lazard Capital Markets, believes that the video game market will shrink by 10 percent when compared to March 2010, with Pokemon the biggest seller, and also sees that Nintendo 3DS as being the biggest hardware device for the month that was.
Doug Creutz, working for Cowen and Company, believes that the decline will not be as big, with the entire industry only dropping by 5 percent in value when compared to the same period of 2010.
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