14 DAY TRIAL // The NPD Group numbers of the month of February are out and they're pretty good, given the impact that the economic crisis has on the world economy. The videogaming business has grown in North America by no less than 10% over the same period in 2008, reaching an overall value of 1.47 billion dollars. The 10% growth rate is good but somewhat slower than the 13% growth rate that the industry saw in January.
Depending on how you choose to count, either Street Fighter IV from Capcom or Wii Fit from Nintendo can be said to be the best sold videogame of the month. The Nintendo fitness title, which has been dominating the videogame chart in North America for quite some time, sold the most SKUs for a single platform, with 644,000 copies moved. The fighting game from Capcom sold 446,000 units for the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and 403,000 units on the PlayStation 34 from Sony, which means that it is the best sold overall title.
Wii Play managed to occupy fourth spot, with sales of 386,000 units, while Killzone 2, the PS3 exclusive set to be the FPS that helps sell Sony’s platform, managed to move 323,000 copies in its release month, coming just ahead of Mario Kart for the Nintendo Wii, which posted sales of 263,000.
Call of Duty: World at War, from Treyarch and Activision, continues to sell well on the Xbox 360, ahead of Mario Kart DS, New Super Mario Bros on the DS and Guitar Hero World Tour, which ends the top ten, with sales of just 136,000 units.
Anita Frazier, who is an analyst for the NPD Group, says that “Consumers picked up nearly 20 million units of video game software in February, a 14% increase over February 2008. The average retail price for games is 4% lower than last year, which is why the dollar sales increase is not quite keeping in pace with the increase in unit sales,” and that March is shaping up to be another good month for videogame releases, with titles like Pokemon Platinum, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Halo Wars and Resident Evil 5 dominating the charts.