US Game Sales Decline 17%

The NPD figures for US games industry sales in April are in. They don't look that great... but is it post Easter and pre.... well, a long way pre-Xmas.

Year-on-year sales were down 17% for the month, dropping from $1.24 billion in 2008 to $1.03 billion this year.

Hardware sales suffered on the whole, barring the impressive performance of the DS (which nearly doubled its sales from March to 1.04 billion - thank the DSi) and a bit of an upturn for the PS2. The Wii's sales dropped by nearly half from 601K in March to 340K in April. The Xbox 360 was next with 175K.

Perhaps the most alarming thing in there was the fact that the PS2 sat behind the 360 at 172K (climbing from 112K last month), beating the PS3's 127K and the PSP's 116K. It's particularly odd, given that Sony laid part of the blame for its games loss on declining PS2 sales.

The software Top 10 looked like this:

1. Wii Fit - Wii – Nintendo – 471K
2. Pokemon Platinum - DS – Nintendo – 433K
3. Mario Kart - Wii – Nintendo – 210K
4. Wii Play - Wii – Nintendo – 170K
5. The Godfather II - Xbox 360 – EA – 155K
6. Resident Evil 5 - Xbox 360 – Capcom – 122K*
7. New Super Mario Bros. - DS – Nintendo – 119K
8. Mario Kart DS - DS – Nintendo – 112K
9. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith - Xbox 360 – Activision – 110K*
10. The Godfather II - PS3 – EA – 91K

^{Via GameDaily}