Videogame Sales Take Big Hit In March
Sales of game hardware also dropped, by 18 percent for the month, year-over-year, and accessories slid by 15 percent, according to the NPD Group. The sales drop might be partially attributable to the overall economic slowdown, said Chris Remo, an editor for game development Web site Gamasutra.
"It may be that consumer demand for video games is starting to reflect the overall [downward] trends in consumer demand. But I think that in the long run, the video game industry is likely to suffer less in this economy than other industries," he said.
Remo said that certain new titles released in March, such as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, were expected to sell far more units than they did, indicating that the overall quality of new titles was likely also a factor in the sales drop. Market watchers had expected Chinatown Wars, released March 17 in North America, to sell "several hundreds of thousands" of units but wound up moving fewer than 100,000 last month, he said.
Meanwhile, releases last March included one of 2008's best-selling titles, Nintendo's Super Smash Bros., which sold 2.7 million units during the month. The top selling new game this March was Capcom's Resident Evil 5, a March 13 North American release with 1.5 million units sold for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
Nintendo continued to own leading market share in hardware sales for March, selling 601,000 Wii consoles and 563,000 units of its handheld DS, according to NPD.
But Wii sales dropped 20 percent against February's figures, even as Nintendo's main competitors in the console market suffered their own, less precipitous sales declines. Microsoft sold 330,000 Xbox 360 units in March, a 15 percent decline from February, while 218,000 PS3 consoles sold in March represented a 7 percent month-to-month drop for manufacturer Sony.