June 2012 NPD Number Crunch: LEGO Batman 2 tops sales charts

Comic book super heroes managed to bookend the NPD Group's software top ten chart for the month of June, which overall sadly delivered yet another double-digit, year-on-year drop in sales.  NPD analyst Anita Frazier has attributed the year-on-year declines suffered thus far into 2012 to a lower number of new titles released at retail compared to last year.

LEGO Batman 2 launched last month and would eventually garner handsome unit sales of 450,000, enough to secure a lead over all other titles.  Rounding off the top ten meanwhile is Activision's own licensed movie game for the new The Amazing Spider-Man motion picture.  Nintendo's Pokemon Conquest also managed to succeed in landing on the NPD software top ten for June, which certainly isn't a bad showing for a feudal Japanese-themed franchise spin-off.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to bask in the warm glow of having the best-selling console hardware on the market.  With sales of 257,000 units, the Xbox 360 claims the crown for hardware of the month for eighteenth time in a row.

Further figures for competing platforms could be gleamed from Nintendo's own announcement that their 3DS handheld has now hit lifetime sales of 5 million units in the U.S. alone.  Nintendo boasts combined sales of at least 400,000 hardware units last month, including over 155,000 3DS handhelds, 150,000 DSes and 95,000 Wii consoles.

June 2012 US Games Industry Summary
Total Industry Sales - $699.8 million USD (-29%)
Console Hardware Sales - $201.3 million USD (-45%)
Console Software Sales - $328.7 million USD (-29%)
Total Software Sales - $362.8 million USD (-27%)
Accessory Sales - $169.8 million USD (+4%)