NPD September 2012: Industry declines, Xbox 360 and Madden on Top

Poor month overall.

Posted By | On 12th, Oct. 2012

We have the September 2012 NPD sales and as expected Madden 2013 has topped the software charts. Borderlands 2 did well, followed by FIFA 13 which only had a few days on the market. It’s not unwise to assume that it would have taken the top spot had it been counted for a few more days.

Hardware and software sales have dropped by quite an amount which is weird considering its the holiday season almost and there have been plenty of good games to have been released in the month.

There was a 24% decline year-on-year. Hardware sales dropped by 39% and software sales dropped by 14%, which is quite disappointing,

“While year-over-year declines are present in video game software, we are seeing momentum leading up to the holidays when looking at August sales compared to September, which were up 67% on an average sales-per-week basis,” NPD’s Liam Callahan said.

“These sales figures represent new physical retail sales of hardware, software and accessories, which account for roughly 50 percent of the total consumer spend on games.

“When you consider our preliminary estimate for other physical format sales in September such as used and rentals at $191MM, and our estimate for digital format sales including full game and add-on content downloads including microtransactions, subscriptions, mobile apps and the consumer spend on social network games at $488MM, we would estimate the total consumer spend in September to be just under $1.6B.”

The Xbox 360 sold 270k and we don’t have the numbers for the rest yet.

Software chart:

  • Madden NFL 13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSV)
  • Borderlands 2 (360, PS3, PC)
  • FIFA Soccer 13 (360, PS3, PSV, Wii, 3DS, PSP)
  • New Super Mario Bros 2 (3DS)
  • Guild Wars 2 (PC)
  • NHL 13 (360, PS3)
  • World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria (PC)
  • NCAA Football 13 (360, PS3)
  • LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (wii, 360, NDS, PS3, 3DS, PSV, PC)
  • Battlefield 3 (360, PS3, PC)

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