NEW YORK — U.S. retail sales of video game consoles and software dropped 4 percent in January, but the falloff would have been larger if not for the burgeoning popularity of Ubisoft’s Just Dance 2 and other dancing games, experts said.
Market researcher NPD Group reported last week that total sales of game software, hardware and accessories were $1.14 billion last month. That’s down from $1.18 billion in January 2010.
Hardware sales fell 8 percent to $324 million from $353.7 million.
Software sales slipped 5 percent to $576 million from $606.8 million. That’s a smaller drop than the 8 percent falloff in software sales that analysts had been expecting.
Jesse Divnich, an analyst at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, said the smaller-than-expected decline was due to strong sales of dancing games, which are just starting to take off.
The month’s best-selling game was the blockbuster Call of Duty: Black Ops from Activision Blizzard Inc.
But Just Dance 2 came in at No. 2 and another dance game, Dance Central, was also in the top 10.
Business, Pages 13 on 02/21/2011