14 DAY TRIAL // The NPD Group, which tracks video games sales data for the United States market, has announced that for the month of April the industry has managed to post an impressive 20 percent increase in the value of its sales when compared to the same period of last year, the first month of solid growth since November 2010.
961.2 million dollars were spent during April on hardware, accessories and video games.
The biggest reason for the good performance of the United States video game industry was the timing of Easter, which fell into April as opposed to March last year.
Still Anita Frazier, who is an analyst working with the NPD Group, has said that just about 60 million dollars of the growth could be attributed to Easter while close to 100 million dollars in value were the result of natural development.
The sales of hardware increased by 12 percent when compared to April 2010, reaching 279.9 million dollars coming from 249.5.
When it comes to actual units, the increase is of about 3%, which shows the impact of the Nintendo 3DS.
The best sold console for the month of April was the Xbox 360 from Microsoft, which continues its impressive run, with the manufacturer saying that it has managed to sell 279,000 units in one month.
The Nintendo DS came in second place, continuing to perform better than the newer Nintendo 3DS, which just had its full one-month period on sale.
Sales of the PlayStation 3 were also up, reaching a little over 200,000 units sold.
Sales of accessories were on the rise also, reaching 147.6 million dollars, which represents an increase of no less than 20 percent over April 2010.
The 1600 Points Game Card for the Xbox Live was the best-selling item and the Full Deployment Bundle for the shooter SOCOM 4, which includes the game, a Move controller and the gun accessory, also performed well.