NPD Software: NCAA Football 12 Beats Cars 2 to Top Position

The EA Sports made NCAA Football 12 college football simulation has managed to top the video game sales chart compiled by the NPD Group for the United States market and for the July market.

Overall the video game industry has seen a big slump, of 26 percent year over year, with the overall value of sales coming in at 707.7 million dollars, which is the lowest retail value since October 2006.

Video game sales managed to perform better than hardware and have seen a decline of just 17 percent when compared to July 2010, which is quite a performance considering that very few important titles were launched during the previous month.

NCAA Football 12 managed to sell 15% more copies than the version of the game launched last year and took first place in the video game chart ahead of Cars 2, the movie tie-in game from Disney Interactive Studios.

It seems that the main reason for the sales increase for NCAA Football 12 has been the fact that the main franchise, Madden NFL 12, is now slated to launch on August 30, later than usual.

Call of Duty: Black Ops from Treyarch and Activision Blizzard has taken third spot in the chart.

The rest of the top ten is made up of: Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game, Just Dance 2, Major League Baseball 2K11, Zumba Fitness: Join the Party, Fallout: New Vegas, New Super Mario Bros. and Mortal Kombat 2011.

Anita Frazier, the analyst who usually comments on the figures, stated, “New physical retail sales of software saw a 10 percent decline in unit sales versus last July. There were substantially fewer new releases this year, and the top selling games, with the exception of NCAA 12, didn’t perform as well as last year’s top sellers did. Looking across PC, console and portable game sales, 19 titles sold over 100K units last July, while this year, only eight titles peaked 100K units.”