14 DAY TRIAL // The NPD Group has released its sales figures for the month of February 2010 in the United States and even though the industry performed better than expected, beating the same period in 2010 by 3 percent when it comes to sales, the software segment was mostly disappointing, seeing a decline of 8%.
Hardware did better than analysts expected in February, with the Xbox 360 again leading the charge and managing to sell 545,000 units during the month, but all the home console saw increases in February 2011.
Video games managed to reach a total sales value of 637.4 million dollars and the total value of sales for the top ten games actually increased over February 2010, but the statistics were dragged down by the smaller number of titles launched this year.
Call of Duty: Black Ops, the first-person shooter from developer Treyarch and publisher Activision Blizzard, again was the best sold game in the United States, undoubtedly helped by the fact that the Xbox 360 version received the first map based downloadable content pack, called First Strike.
The first newcomer to enter the video game chart was Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds from Capcom, at number two.
Both these titles managed to sell more than 554,000 units, the figure that was reached by Just Dance 2, the Ubisoft-published music-based game, which came in at number three.
NBA 2K11 from Take Two has arrived in fourth spot while Dead Space 2, the horror survival game from Visceral and Electronic Arts, has managed to come in at fifth in its second month on sale.
The big surprise is that two big name newcomers from February, Killzone 3 and Bulletstorm, performed rather poorly, occupying seventh and eight place, just behind Majesco's Zumba Fitness: Join the Party.
Michael Jackson: The Experience is at number nine while Mario Sports Mix closes down the chart.