The February NPD report is out and it has proved to be yet another solid month for Xbox. Microsoft maintained its place as the top console producer selling 460,000 units of the Xbox 360. That’s good for a 42 percent market share which extended the Xbox’s streak to twelve consecutive months with +40 percent market share. Out of the top 10 best selling games for the month, only the number nine title, Twisted Metal 2012, was not available on the Xbox. Total video game sales for February were $1.06 billion which was comprised of $381.4 million in hardware sales, $464.4 million in software sales, and $215.2 million in accessory sales. Overall video game sales were down approximately 20 percent from February of last year.
UPDATE:
Overall hardware sales in February 2011 were $467 million which is an 18 percent decline Y/Y. Overall software sales in February 2011 were $601 million which is an 23 percent decline Y/Y. Overall accessory sales in February 2011 were $257 million which is an 16 percent decline Y/Y.
In February of 2011, the Xbox had its biggest non-holiday sales month with over 535K units sold which heavily aided hardware sales. Accessory sales in 2011 benefited from the release of the Kinect a few months earlier and those benefits were not present in last month’s sales. As far as software sales, Anita Frazier an analyst from the NPD group said “a decline in catalog sales was a major contributor to the decline in content sales at retail”. This indicates that people used different methods for getting games such as purchasing used games, F2P, add-ons, rentals, or subscriptions. All of these methods are not calculated in software sales however these medians did see a $50 million increase from January ($600 million vs $550 million).
