Madden, Nintendogs Top August U.S. Sales

The NPD group's console sales data has come out for the month of August 2005, and the big winner for the month was EA Sports' Madden NFL 2006 with 2.2 million copies sold across all three consoles. Coming out just one month after NCAA 06 Football topped the charts in July, Electronic Arts' football juggernaut remains one of its biggest cash cows, particularly with exclusive licenses to the official sporting league. Madden's sales made up over $100 million of the $338 million in overall sales for the month, a total remaining consistent with previous years. The month's earnings brought the year-to-date sales up to $3.02 billion, a 9% improvement over 2004's $2.77 billion through August. With Madden dominating sales on all three home systems, the main point of interest is in the second-place titles. On PS2, NCAA Football 06 continues its streak from last month, with Delta Force: Black Hawk Down in third. The same two titles did well on Xbox, but in reverse order: the FPS-happy userbase of Microsoft's system preferred Black Hawk Down of the two. On GameCube, Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life took second place, while Super Smash Brothers Melee at its Player's Choice pricepoint is still in third place. On handheld systems, the Nintendo DS put forth the second-best seller of the month; the three versions of totaled $7.1 million in sales between them. The Chihuahua version was least popular, being the only one of the three to perform below the top-selling PSP game, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition.