NPD Hardware: Xbox 360 Has Record Month, Wii Blows Past 35 Million

The NPD Group has released its sales results for the month of February on the United States market, surprising quite a few people by showing an increase of about 3 percent in terms of sales for the video games industry, as both hardware and accessories managed to do better than analysts predicted.

The total of new retail sales for the month of February, including the PC, has reached 1.36 billion for the month while console only sales went up by 4 percent to reach 1.33 billion.

Hardware sales were up 10% year over year, reaching 466.9 million, with home consoles managing to see a significant increase of more than one quarter while portables declined by more than 10 percent.

The best-selling device was again the Xbox 360 from Microsoft, which managed to move 535,000 units to customers, an increase of more than 27 percent over February 2010.

Nintendo chose to also reveal sales numbers, saying that the Wii sold 454,000 consoles during February, putting its lifetime total in the United States at more than 35 million, the fastest platform to reach the number.

The NPD Group says that the PlayStation 3 also saw an increase over last year, but one that is smaller than that of the Xbox 360 and Sony has not yet offered an actual number of consoles sold.

Anita Frazier, who is an analyst with the NPD Group, has said, “We are looking for the portable segment of the market to rebound beginning later this month when the highly anticipated 3DS launches in the U.S. on March 27th.”

Accessories performed even better than gaming consoles, increasing by 22 percent when compared to February 2010 and reaching 256.9 million dollars in sales value.

Both the Kinect for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation Move for PS3 are doing well, but the biggest increase has been in the points cards category, which was up by 22 percent.