January 13 news, the U.S. market research firm NPD report released on Thursday, as the old game players reduce software purchases, resulting in the United States in December last year, video game hardware, software and accessories retail sales only $ 3.99 billion, down 21%.
NPD analyst Anita Frazier said: “Given the current game will be eliminated, this result is not entirely surprising.” However, this data is clearly the market is quite disappointing. Fraser said that considering the “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3″ and “Just Dance 3″ and other games of hot, weak performance last December that there are some unexpected.
In November, Microsoft Xbox 360 will be available in a full seven years, and its predecessor, the product life cycle is only 4 years. Sony PlayStation 3 in November this year will be listed at least six years, the previous generation PlayStation 2 is in the market after six years out. Nintendo Wii also has been listed for six years, but the previous generation GameCube was released five years out.
Sony and Microsoft has not announced development plans for the next generation of consoles, Nintendo is expected to be released later this year with a touch screen handles the Wii U.
Not only some of the old game, the game’s release means is also changing. Consumers want more content via the Internet, which led to last December’s U.S. retail sales of video game software is only $ 2.04 billion, down 14%.
NPD data shows that in December last year, retail sales of U.S. video game hardware fell 28%, only $ 1,320,000,000; accessories fell 27%, to 6.29 billion U.S. dollars.
Specific to the last year, retail sales of U.S. video game industry as a whole fell 8% to $ 17.02 billion. Among them, the hardware retail sales fell 11 percent to $ 5.58 billion; software retail sales of 88.3 billion, down 6%; accessory retail sales of 26.1 billion U.S. dollars, down 11%.