And you think that the recession just hits the videogame industry all of a sudden?! If you noticed, you would see that in the past few months the revenue increase has become less and less each month when compared to last year's.

The videogame industry is supposed to be a fairly solid when there's a recession, and is still holding up well than other industries. But the longer the the economy stays this way, it will worsen things.

I think you are trying to complicate things.

I however just remembered something..... in February didn't many Americans get some kind of money from the government (tax rebate?).... which means the huge drop is artificially huge. February would not normally be bigger than January, yet it was.... without that increase from Jan to Feb, this would not have looked anywhere near as odd.

Perhaps the NPD is undertracking, then? Although we can't know exactly why. Maybe consumer confidence really just took a nosedive this month...

Well if you must know the NPD is just trying to figure out basicly what Walmart sold(and misc store)... if Walmart wasn't full of dicks we'd have a much clearer picture of sales.

As much as I am gonna feel silly trying to tell Brett about tracking video game sales :P

My guess is that the yo-yo-ing could by NPD's form of adjustments. If they find out they overtracked the Wii one month, then they could deliberately undertrack it next month so that their numbers balance out in the long run

Totally un-related to the numbers. But i rang my friend who is the manager of HMV in Oxford street in london. One of the biggest games stores in europe.
I told him about these numbers suggesting the 360 and PS3 were a lot closer then we had all assumed. I asked him how HMV in UK were seeing it and he said "PS3 sales have been down quite a lot since KillZone 2 was released. We have stopped taking shipments due to having quite a bit of excess stock already. We wanted to put some of them in the Easter Sales but were told not to. However we have now started doing our own console deals to try and clear the stock by offering a 80GB PS3 with 2 wireless Sixaxis duelshock 3 controllers with KZ2 and a choice of a 2nd game i.e Fifa 09 all for £289. He also told me they had put prices of PS3 games down by a lot to try and get customers to buy. Like LBP for £14. SF4 for £25. Lair for £7 etc etc. Blu-Ray Discs were having to be put in deals to try and clear the stock i.e 2 for £20 or even some for dirt cheap solo like Terminator 2 on Blu-Ray for £7."
I asked him in comparison to the other consoles how was it doing in your shop and he replied "nowhere near what we expected it would do". I asked for some sales and he said "Can't tell you that information but will say Wii sells twice as many as 360 sells and 360 sells twice as many as PS3 sells".
So if that is correct and i have no reason to not believe it then maybe that trend has followed suit in america and is why we saw the numbers we have. We all thought the PS3 was doing better then it was when really it was nearly being out sold 2 to 1. People could of generated hype through word of mouth for the PS3 so when someone says PS3 has sold only 200k in March you would not believe it due to the titles it had out i.e KZ2,RE5 etc etc.

Thats what i think might have happened, we just got carried away thinking the PS3 might have been going through a good period.