NPD March 2010 Analysis: Industry sales up 6% to $1.52B

NPD has released the sales figures for the month of March 2010, and the analysis done by Anita Fraizer shows industry sales totaling $1.52 billion, which is up 6 percent for the year.

Overall, the US industry was in decline by 7 percent, with total sales reaching an estimated $3.96B.

Software climbed 10 percent to $875.3M with accessories seeing a good month as well with $206.8M in sales, which is up significantly.

The only sector that declined for the month was hardware, which fell 4 percent to $440.5M for the month. Fraizer believes this was due to some console shortages and even with the drop, hardware sales are up YOY.

"There may be inventory shortages playing into it, but frankly, unit sales of hardware were up over 7 percent versus last year, it's just that prices are down +10 percent, thus total dollar sales declined for hardware.

"Every single category was up in unit sales for the month compared to last year, which is great performance for the industry. Overall, average retail prices were down 3 percent so that softened the impact of the increased unit sales when looking at revenue performance.

"There were a lot of records and trends this month that were great to see. Eight of the top 10 software SKUs were new items this month, and many launched with considerable introduction month unit sales that were significantly larger than the last launch for the franchise including God of War 3, Battlefield, and Final Fantasy XIII.

"The two Pokemon SKUs combined to sell nearly 1.8 million units.

"The PS3 platform contributed the most of all platforms to industry dollar sales performance, driven by stellar software sales. Hardware units were up as I said earlier. There is just really so many good things to point out this month we're still uncovering them in the data."

When going by single unit sales, God of War III was tops with 1.1M units moved, and FFXIII second at 828.2KM moved on PS3.

Actual figures have FFXIII as the best seller of the month with combined units of 1.32M, BBFC2 second with
1.27M units, and then GOW3 with 1.10M.

If you want to get really, really, really technical, Pokemon Heart/Soul blew past the lot with 1.76M units.

With software, NPD  pointed out that:

• God of War III bested the God of War II launch by 32 percent
• Thanks in large part to its multi-platform launch on Xbox 360 and PS3, Final Fantasy XIII is the best launch for any item in the franchise. The next closest was Final Fantasy XII, a PS2 exclusive, which launched and sold 896K units in Nov '06. FFXIII sales in its introduction month were 48 percent greater than that of FFXII.
• In its first month of sales in the U.S., Battlefield: Bad Company 2 bested the launch of Battlefield: Bad Company by +170 percent. Even considering that the first was launched later in its introduction month while BC2 enjoyed nearly a full month of sales, the increase is impressive.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is now the second-best-selling game of all time, after Wii Play.

Hardware sales saw DS and Wii continuing to rein supreme, with 700.8K and 557.5K units moved, respectively.