USA Retail Sales Preview for July 2011 - News
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 09 August 2011 / 6,531 Views
NPD figures for the USA video game market, over the four weeks ending July 30, 2011 are coming this Thursday at 6:30 PM ET. Data from VGChartz is already available for that period. Based on the available data, July 2011 figures, estimated below in the first column, were very bad compared to July 2010. Total USA video game revenue from brick and mortar retail dropped 18% year over year on slowing software sales and rapidly weakening hardware sales.
Adjusting for the size of June (five weeks) compared to the size of July (four weeks), USA hardware sales fell by 23% on a weekly basis, and 29% from July 2010 levels. Without 3DS, the year over year drop is of course even larger for the pre-2011 systems.
Even against the larger July time frame, hardware sales dropped pretty sharply across the board when calculated on a weekly basis. 3DS for instance fell to almost 20,500 per week from about 28,500 per week. With Madden not arriving until what is effectively September, and the 3DS price cut not coming until mid-August, any additional price cuts that are coming will have a lot of work to do given how far the industry has shrank in July (and the shrinking could easily continue into August).
Software sales were also fairly depressing for July:
It really doesn't change on a multi-platform basis either:
The one good story for the month is Catherine from Atlus, which cracked the top ten and could leg out a very respectable global total given the previous performance of the game in Japan. Otherwise, the top software figures are Japan like, as six titles in Japan had topped 100,000 units in July compared to five non-bundled games in the USA. Generally speaking the USA software market is three times larger than the Japanese software market, and it was on a total games basis in July, so its pretty clear that there was simply a dry-spell in hits for Western markets in the summer. That dry spell looks like it will continue into August, before abruptly ending in September on price cuts and major new games.
Contact VGChartz at jmazel@vgchartz.com
