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http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090716/ ... _npd_games

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - U.S. sales of video game equipment and software fell 31 percent to $1.17 billion in June, research group NPD said on Thursday, the largest decline since 2000.

Sales of game software fell 29 percent to $625.8 million, while hardware sales dropped 38 percent to $382.6 million. Sales of accessories declined 22 percent.

Nintendo's Wii was once again the top-selling home console in June with 362,000 units, although sales were down around 45 percent from the same month last year. The Wii has been the top home console in the U.S. for 21 consecutive months, Nintendo said.

Microsoft's XBox 360 was the No. 2 home console, followed by Sony Corp's PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 2.

Sales of the Nintendo DS family of handheld consoles totaled 767,000, NPD said, well above the 164,000 recorded by the Sony PSP.

The top-selling game title was Activision Blizzard's "Prototype," which sold around 600,000 units across two platforms.

This could actually be a good sign... Meaning the life span of the consoles we purchased will be supported longer... Hopefully..

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Microsoft's AAron Greenberg: "We're Less Than Halfway Through The Console Cycle"

"Sales of Xbox 360 in the U.S. reached 241,000 units during the month of June, a 9 percent year-over-year increase -- but Microsoft's hoping the industry takes a macro view of the first six months of 2009."

"Our console sales for the first half of the year actually grew 20 percent from January to June versus the same six months last year," Microsoft's Xbox 360/Xbox Live group product manager Aaron Greenberg tells Gamasutra in an interview conducted alongside the June 2009 NPD results. "We're the only console that grew in the first half of the year."

But capturing the early adopters in the core market first, and then expanding outward to ever more mainstream audiences has always been part of the company's strategy, says Greenberg.

"We started in the inner circle, and we'll continue to deliver those core experiences... going after them first was important," he explains. "I think for Sony, what in many ways kind of threw them off that strategy was what happened with the PS2 and the DVD player phenomenon. They kind of expected that to happen with the PS3 and the Blu-ray."