Gamasutra posted some excerpts from the latest NPD report on game and hardware sales for the month of March. Game sales slipped year over year by 8%, dropping to $499 million. Hardware dropped 31% to $220 million. Last year had some very high profile titles for the PS2 ship, and also saw the launch of the PSP, making for an unusually high hardware and software sales. Of course, this year is being marked as a transition year for game consoles, since the Xbox 360 has already shipped, and gamers wait in anticipation for the PS3 and the Revolution to hit the stores. March was still a bad month to try and buy an Xbox 360, since Microsoft still really hadn’t had their distribution and manufacturing situation ironed out, and this definitely contributed to lower software sales, since some eagerly anticipated titles for the Xbox 360 shipped, including Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. Titles like Metroid and Tetris probably helped make the drop less than expected, but aside from Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence there weren’t a lot of widely-appealing games shipping on the PS2. The next few months probably won’t bring much relief to this situation, particularly as the next generation console launches from Nintendo and Sony grow ever closer.

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