US hardware sales down in May

News - NPD numbers make for eye-watering reading

The latest NPD numbers have been unleashed stateside, and in line with April's results this was once again a bad month for the North American games business.

Not only did hardware sales suffer from April into May, but there was also a year-on-year decline over the same month in 2008.

The DS and the Wii consoles were still the month's big winners, even though these systems were also down over last month. The DS (DSi and DS Lite combined) sold over 633,000 units during the month - followed by the Wii on 289,000.

Then there's the Xbox 360 with 175,000 units sold, followed by the PS3 on 131,000, the PS2 on 117,000 - the PSP last with just over 100,000 units shifted.

Overall, hardware sales were down 30 percent over 2008, Anita Frazier offering: "The video games industry continues to struggle with difficult comparisons to last year, and this is the first month that industry sales have dipped below 1 billion USD since August 2007. May is typically one of the lowest revenue-generating months in any given year for the industry in general."