Retail is down 25% from February 2012
The NPD Group has releasedgame sales datafor February 2013, which means it’s time to play another exciting round of “good news, bad news”!
Hardware sales have actually risen compared to January, which is evenbetternews considering this past January was a five-week reporting period while February was a four-week period. Xbox 360 naturally took the crown again with 302K consoles moved, but even Wii U and PS Vita managed to increase their average weekly sales by over 40% and 30% respectively. Compared to thepathetic performancesby both new machines last month, this would put the Wii U at 66K and Vita above 36K, which is… still kinda terrible, actually.
But hey! The 3DS has finally crossed 8 million units! Which is cool, until you realize that it still has 3 million to go to reach the10.8 million totalin Japan. You know, that tiny country with only 40% of the population of the US? Yeah,what’s up with that?
Overall sales are down 25% year over year, despite having “the same number of February launches that landed in the top ten ranking this year as there were last February, collectively,” according to NPD analyst Liam Callahan. At least E3 is happy that bothDead Space 3andCrysis 3placed first and third on the software chart. Additionally, theSkylandersbrand continues to be a money-maker — software and figurines contributed a cool $35 million to the monthly total.
Now without further ado, I give you the top ten games list:
Top 10 software chart (SKUs combined)
