14 DAY TRIAL // The figures for the North American market launched by the NPD Group for the month of August has show the video game industry decline in terms of sales by about 10 percent over the same period of last year, with the software segment being the hardest hit, despite the very successful launch of the Electronic Arts made Madden NFL 11.
Sales of video games dropped by a significant 14 percent when compared to the August of 2009, reaching 403.5 million dollars in value, while the hardware segment saw a smaller drop but on a smaller overall sales number, 5% to 282.9 million.
The NPD Group does not count PC games for its video games chart, which means that it has not taken into account the very good performance of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty.
The Blizzard made real time strategy title sold more than 300,000 units and could have been the third selling title in the chart, without taking into account digital distribution sales.
Madden NFL 11 managed an impressive first month on sale, taking both the first position and the second one in the software chart.
The Xbox 360 version of the EA Sports made football simulation managed to sell 920,800 units in a little over two real weeks on sales while the PlayStation 3 almost reached parity with 893,600 copies moved to gamers.
When compared to the launch of Madden NFL 10 last year the game actually saw a small slow down on the Xbox 360 while experiencing an increase of more than 200,000 copies on the Sony home console.
Anita Frazier, an analyst working with the NPD Group, says that sales for all the platform on which Madden NFL 11 launched were up by 6 percent over the same period in 2009.
Behind the sports based blockbuster sales were significantly smaller than last year.
Super Mario Galaxy 2 from Nintendo for the Wii took third spot with sales of just 124,600 units, a lot less than the over 700,000 posted by Wii Sports Resort in August 2009.
Mafia II also had a touch start with the Xbox 360 version managing to take fourth spot on 121,600 units sold while the PlayStation 3 version took seventh spot.
New Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo DS took fifth spot while its Wii cousin is in sixth.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 took eight place, with NCAA Football 11 from Electronic Arts at nine and Wii Fit Plus closing down the top ten.