Video Game Reviews 4 You

Posted September 8, 2011 by James Brightman

August, with the exception of EA Sports' annual Madden franchise, is a typically slow month, but this year EA had to push back Madden due to the threat of the NFL lockout. As a result, August retail sales plummeted 23% to $669.9 million for the U.S. games industry as software dropped 34% to $264.8 million. Hardware didn't fare much better, falling 12% to $249.4 million. Accessories were down just 1% to $134.7 million.

The one bright light for U.S. game sales was Square Enix's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which saw great reviews and solid sales despite some controversy over an NPC that some in the industry felt was 'racist.' Deus Ex easily grabbed the top spot on NPD's August chart, but it's worth noting that most of the top 10 were casual fare from the likes of Disney and Ubisoft. Perhaps casual gamers and parents looking to satisfy their kids during the summer gravitated toward these titles. EA's NCAA Football also did quite well again, as NPD's Anita Frazier noted: "NCAA Football ’12 did better in its second month at retail than did NCAA Football ’11 in August 2010, which could be an indication of Madden fans looking to get their football fix elsewhere due to the delay in the release of that title.”

On the hardware front, Frazier noted the PS3 sales uptick but also pointed out that portable saw a bump thanks to the 3DS price cut too. “All platforms (if you combine DS and 3DS) saw unit sales increases over July.  The 3DS price cut drove portable hardware sales into positive territory, to a year-over-year increase in both unit and dollar sales," she said.

Despite the dissapointing 2011 the U.S. industry has seen so far, NPD made sure to remind everyone that calendar Q4 could be huge.

“Even though year to date performance of the new physical portion of the industry is down 5%, more than half of industry sales in this channel are still to be realized in the back four months of the year," said Frazier. "Given the strong release schedule in the coming months, new physical retail sales could still be flat to slightly up once full year sales are tallied.”

She added, “Games fans have a huge variety to choose from in September, especially for fans of games in the sports genre. Those interested in more 'core' gaming experiences have both Resistance 3 and Gears of War 3, among others, to look forward to.  Yes, some of these are already out in the market but we’ll get our first picture of their combined sales performance in the new physical retail channel when we release those figures on October 13.” 

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.