August NPDs: Madden Rushes Dark Knight, Industry Struggles to Recover

As the industry posted its sixth month of year-over-year losses, there were some interesting battles in the software side of things. You gotta give Bats credit – it took the entire combined NFL (and three quarters of a million Wii Sports Resort fans) to keep him out of the top three. However, you also must factor in the fact that Batman: Arkham Asylum was only on sale for one week of the month and still managed to rake in over half a million copies sold. Madden NFL 10, which had ten more days on store shelves, shifted almost a million units on Xbox 360 alone and over 600k on PlayStation 3. Will either of them have the legs to still be around next month when they have competition like Halo 3: ODST, Guitar Hero 5 and The Beatles: Rock Band to face? That remains to be seen.

Elsewhere in the top ten, Dissidia: Final Fantasy (yes, a PSP title) was spotted at number seven though many believe such accounts may well be hoaxes, as we all know PSP games don’t actually sell. Well, maybe they do when they’re Final Fantasy, I suppose. We’re still marking that one in the potential BS file for now. Meanwhile, Wolfenstein didn’t even crack the floor, which was held by Fossil Fighters for DS at 92k. The hardware breakdown can be found under the cut, along with the specific numbers.

Hardware saw a bump from last month in all categories except for PlayStation 2, which saw a drop. PlayStation 3 sales almost doubled, in fact – no doubt driven by the mid-month price cut – but given how poor last month’s sales were that’s not saying a lot. Doubtlessly many consumers that had been waiting for this long continued to hold off until they could get their hands on a PS3 Slim at the beginning of September. I guess we’ll know for sure come this time next month, eh?

August 2009 Software Sales