14 DAY TRIAL // The NPD Group has released its sales data for the North American market for the month of August, showing an overall decline in sales of about 10 percent, and the newly relaunched Xbox 360 home console from Microsoft selling better than the DS line of handhelds, the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Nintendo Wii.
The entire industry saw a drop in sales of about 91.4 million dollars when compared with the same period of last year, reaching a low of 818.9 million.
Hardware saw a smaller decline that software, with sales going down by five percent to reach 282.9 million dollars.
The Xbox 360 managed to sell 356,700 units during the month of August, which is quite an increase over the 215,400 it managed to move to gamers during the same period of last year.
Much of the increase can be attributed to the relaunch of the console, which now has a new design and makes much less noise that the previous model.
The Nintendo DS family managed to take second spot in the hardware chart, with sales of 342,700 units spread across three different models.
The Nintendo Wii is third in the chart, managing to post sales of 244,300, but the manufacturer must be worried about the sales numbers, especially considering that both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 will likely grow in the coming months.
The PlayStation 3 managed sales of 226,000 units for the month of August, a little over the number that it achieved in August 2009, but Sony must be disappointed to be so far behind the Xbox 360.
The PlayStation Portable handheld continues its slowdown, selling 79,400 devices.
Anita Frazier, who is an analyst of the video game industry working with the NPD Group, has said that these results are the weakest for the month of August since 2006, when the Nintendo Wii and the PlayStation 3 had not been launched.
Still she believes that the upcoming launches of the PlayStation Move and Kinect motion tracking peripherals and a slew of titles like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty will push sales up for the coming months.