Canada game sales dip for first time in 7 years - NPD

The Canadian game industry is cooling off. For the past seven years, the industry-tracking NPD Group has been following Canadian retail game revenues without seeing a single year-over-year decline in quarterly sales. That run has come to an end, as the NPD Group this week announced that its tracking for the first quarter of 2009 found that through March, industry sales were down 8.5 percent.

The NPD Group wouldn't put a dollar figure on Canada's industry tally, but it did say that hardware sales had suffered the most. Portable revenues were down 21 percent, while consoles were off 14.5 percent from the previous year's first-quarter totals.

Software did considerably better, with portable and console game sales down 1.5 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively. In fact, the Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and DS all posted increases in software sales. However, in a statement about the numbers, the NPD said those gains were offset by the remaining consoles on the market, going so far as to suggest that Sony's recently price-dropped PS2 and rumored-to-be-refreshed PSP are both not long for this world.

"Sony's PS2 and PSP, Nintendo's Game Boy Advance and GameCube, and Microsoft's Xbox all saw dramatic declines in software sales figures, signaling these consoles may be near their end of life," the NPD said, not mentioning that the latter three systems have all ceased production.

While the US gaming industry suffered a down March, Canada's neighbor to the south still managed to come out ahead for the first quarter. For the January-March period, the US game industry generated $4.25 billion, barely up from the $4.24 billion that it generated during the same period in 2008.