US games market tumbles to five year low

After showing some impressive resilience over the last few months, the US games market has been brought crashing back to earth.

NPD reports that for the month of July the games market was down 26 per cent year-on-year with a value if just $797.7m. That’s the worst single month since October 2006.

There is no getting around the fact that videogame sales in the new physical retail channel suffered its lowest month since October 2006,” NPD analyst Anita Frazier confessed.

Hardware sales in isolation were down 29 per cent at $299m. And while the Xbox 360 retained the leading spot with 277k unit sales, it was down year-on-year, breaking the console’s record-breaking run that has seen it increase sales year-on-year for 13 of the last 14 months.

Software sales fell 17 per cent to $336.2m, mainly due to the barren release schedules that saw only 17 new titles make it to market. Astonishingly, only eight sold over 100k units.

The biggest sellers were NCAA Football 12, Cars 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean and Just Dance 2.

Despite the numbers, NPD remains confident that come the end of the year the 2011 US market will be one of growth.