January Video Game Sales Plunge

An monthly rite among tech reporters is to cover the NPD Group video game data. The information shows which of the three large console companies–Micorosft, with its Xbox, Nintendo, and Sony which makes the PS3–is doing well. NPD also reports what video games are selling well.

The wrinkle in the data is that the rise of smartphones has begun to take market share from traditional video game consoles, just as it has taken market share from almost every other related industry from PCs to televisions.

The report for January showed, according to Gamasutra

As expected, the strongest performing software in January was left over from the holiday period. In fact, no January debuts managed to crack the software top ten chart.   Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was the best selling game, followed by Ubisoft’s Just Dance 3 and Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.   Software sales across all consoles and portables brought in $355.9 million, a 38 percent decline over January 2011. Retail PC games add another $23.7 million to that total.

And.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was the top selling console for the sixth straight month. The 270,000 units it sold contributed to a total of $199.5 million in hardware-based revenues, a decline of 38 percent from the prior year.