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)

Just… two guys doing some weird random stuff in inappropriate places while playing Madden. The commercial boasts of a “console like experience” and also mentions the Madden NFL 13 + PS Vita bundle at the end.

Madden NFL 13 is out on all systems, including the PS Vita. Have a look at our review here. We thought it was a decent game and gave it a 7/10. Read the full review through the link.

Stay tuned for continued coverage.

EA has gone all out with the Xbox 360 version of Madden 13 which features over 6000 voice commands. Now this is something unprecedented and shows how dedicated the team behind the game are.

“It can be confusing with the amount of options we put on the screen to navigate menus. We wanted to use very common language that people can understand to try to allow them to use these commands,” Victor Lugo, designer at EA Tiburon revealed to Eurogamer.

“There are commands that we’re loading directly into the game right now. What dynamic grammars do is take text and dynamically load it in, the name of the characters you have, your custom audibles and basically uses phonics to sound it out.

“If you type your name in there you can just say your name. If you put all your custom audibles in you’ll be able to say them. All that adds up to the ability to add any play into the game and call out the name of any player, and that’s over 6,000 commands.”

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

EA Sports and Microsoft have announced Kinect integration for the upcoming FIFA 13 and Madden NFL 13. The integration seems to be mostly voice commands for FIFA and Madden both, though there may be more to it than just that.

FIFA 13’s voice commands allow you to command substitutions, formations and tactics without pausing the game. Other features were also announced. For example, if, while playing the game, you curse loudly like many gamers do at some bad decision by the referee or anything else, you will be penalised by the match officials. Nice touch.

Madden NFL 13’s demo showed excellent KInect features, perfect for sports games, which is something what core gamers want to see from Kinect. The video ended with a pretty good touchdown by Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana who was demoing the game.

We’ll update with more news as soon as we get it.