The industry has declined by a quarter compared to 2011

Nov 9, 2012 10:23 GMT  ·  By

The NPD Group reveals that NBA 2K13, the basketball simulation title from Visual Concepts and 2K Games, was the best-selling game in the United States for the month of October, while the Xbox 360 continues to lead the home console pack.

The overall news for the industry, as cited by IGN, is increasingly bleak as the NPD Group reports that, for the period between September 30 and October 27, a decline of no less than 25 percent was seen in the value of games-related sales.

The value has dropped down to 755.5 million dollars (591.6 million Euro) when compared to the same period of last year.

The video game top ten includes:

NBA 2K13 Resident Evil 6 Pokemon Black Version 2 Dishonored Pokemon White Version 2 Madden NFL 13 FIFA Soccer 13 Medal of Honor Warfighter Borderlands 2 Skylanders Giants

Despite the low position in the NPD Group chart, the Giants expansion for Skylanders from Activision did better than the initial launch because hardware bundles were not counted.

The big problem for video games sales was that many sequels failed to perform as well as they did in 2011, while new releases were not able to pick up the slack and compensate with sales of their own.

Liam Callahan, an analyst working with the NPD Group, states, “due to the launch of Pokemon Black 2 and Pokemon White 2, portable software sales increased by 37% from last October. However, this growth was not enough to offset declines in console software.”

The NPD figures also show that Dishonored sold about 460,000 units in the United States during October, while XCOM: Enemy Unknown only managed about 114,000.

When it comes to hardware, Microsoft says that it managed to move 270,000 units of the Xbox 360 to gamers during October, which means that it has now been about 20 months since another device topped the United States hardware chart.