USA: Video Games Sales Bomb

USA's primary video games stats collector, the NPD Group, has released the video game hardware and software sales figures for August. It's not pretty reading. According to NPD's Anita Frazier, that's the worst month since 2006.

Basically, American gamers are saving their cash. Could it be because they, like the rest of the western world, are skint? Could it be because everybody is waiting for Halo Reach and Playstation Move? We'll know that next month.

As it stands, revenues for the entire market (hardware, software and peripherals) was down 10% compared to the last period last year.

Year-on-year sales looked like this:

Sales for the whole market (hardware, software and peripherals) dropped by $91.4 from last year to $818.9 million.
Sales of hardware fell $14.7 million to $282.9 million.
Sales of software were down by $67.7 million to $403.5 million.

This means that all-up, sale for the industry in the USA were stood at $8.37 billion for the year so far: that's $720 million.

Here are the details:

Hardware
Home Console
Xbox 360: 356.7k (443.5k)
Wii: 244.3k 253.9k)
PlayStation 3: 226k (214.5k)

Handheld
Nintendo DS: 342.7k (398.4k)
Sony PSP: 79.4k (84k)

Games
Madden NFL 11 - Electronic Arts, 360 - 920,800
Madden NFL 11 - Electronic Arts, PS3 - 893,600
Super Mario Galaxy 2 - Nintendo, Wii - 124,600
Mafia II - Take 2 Interactive, 360 - 121,600
New Super Mario Bros [i] - Nintendo, DS - 110,400