Videogame industry noticed a minor improvement in 2006

Market research group NPD has said that the sales of video game consoles, hand-held devices, games, and accessories in the United States were up by around 6% compared in 2005 to the year before that. However, much of this improvement was due to the launch of two new portable gaming devices, which performed very well in the market.

Sony launched their first ever portable gaming device in Sony Playstation Portable and Nintendo unveiled their innovative Nintendo DS handheld device. Microsoft did launch their next generation gaming console Xbox 360 in the month of November but it failed to change much considering their was huge shortage in the units shipped in the country in the initial launch days.

As per NPD, console dollar sales were down 3 percent in 2005. And the console game dollar sales were down by as much as 12 percent. The combined sales of portable and console based videogames was down to around $6.1 billion in 2005 compared to $6.2 billion in 2004. However, sales of games for portable gaming machines itself were up by around $1.4 billion, which covered well for the losses in console-based games.

This research data did not include games, which are shipped for the personal computers.