
EA's 'NCAA Football 10' scored the most vidgame sales in July.
Videogames took another beating in July, with sales down 29% to $849 million vs. $1.2 billion a year ago.
It's the fifth-straight monthly decline for the gaming biz. Year-to-date sales are down 14% to $8.2 billion.
"In order for the industry to come in flat or slightly up for the total year, the back five months of the year have to come in 11% higher than the last five months of last year," said Anita Frazier, an analyst with NPD Group.
That might be possible with high-profile titles like Electronic Arts' next installment of its popular "Madden" football franchise, as well as "The Beatles: Rock Band," "Halo 3: ODST" and "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" still set to hit store shelves.
The top-selling game in July was EA's "NCAA Football 10," with a combined 689,000 units on multiple platforms, followed by Nintendo's "Wii Sports Resort," which includes the new Wii Motion Plus attachment, moving 508,000 units. "Wii Fit" and "Mario Kart" made up the rest of the top five.
Hardware sales slowed considerably on nearly every platform during the month, with Microsoft's Xbox 360 the only console to show a year-to-date sales increase.
Nintendo's DS had the highest sales of all hardware platforms both for the month and year. The DS sold 539,000 handheld devices during the month, while Nintendo's Wii was the top-selling traditional console with 253,000 units.
Contact Marc Graser at
marc.graser@variety.com