Just got the latest monthly report on video-game sales from the NPD Group. Sales were down for the fifth straight month in July, according to the industry tracking firm, off by 14 percent through the same period last year. That puts year-to-date sales at $8.16 billion, NPD says.

“In order for the industry to come in flat or slightly up for the total year, the back five months of the year have to come in 11 percent (or more) higher than the last five months of last year,” NPD analyst Anita Frazier says.

Tonight’s midnight release of Madden NFL 10 could kick-start such a turn-around, followed by big titles such as Rock Band: Beatles, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3: ODST, she says.

“Of all genres, the music/dance genre has suffered the greatest declines this year, with nearly $390 million less revenues than the same time period last year,” she adds.

That’s probably because, based on feedback from people I know who play games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero, many gamers never download the hundreds of other songs available online for those titles, so the revenue stream dries up.

I’ll have a preview of big video-game releases for the rest of the year next week.

Tonight’s the night. Madden NFL 10, the latest release in one of the most popular video-game series, comes out at midnight. And it will be hard not to know about it, because an advertising blitz for the game will accompany tonight’s season premiere of Monday Night Football (yes, even though it’s Thursday night).

Really, I don’t get all worked up for the latest Madden games each year. To me, their popularity is due more to updated rosters than anything else. Sure, there are all kinds of bells and whistles added each go-round, such as “the all-new Pro-Tak™ animation technology,” and the Wii version has been “completely redesigned and built from the ground up.” But I think most gamers just want to play using the most current version of their favorite teams. (Update: I haven’t played the game yet, but the Associated Press and Game Informer are calling Madden NFL 10 the franchise’s best entry in years, if not ever, in their early reviews.)

Why do you play the Madden games? Do you buy the newest one each year?

I’ll always love John Madden Football ‘92 for the dearly departed Sega Genesis. That was the version in which it was fun to deliberately injure a player, because then an ambulance would race onto the field to retrieve him — running over the other, uninjured players in the process. Hilarious.

Madden NFL 10 will be available at midnight at stores such as Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Gamestop.

Having spent more than five hours Saturday night playing Left 4 Dead with my friend Eric (aka Louis), I found this YouTube video (via Boing Boing) to be pretty funny.

I don’t suffer from first-person-shooter disease, but I did have a creepy feeling recently while visiting Washington, D.C. I couldn’t help but get a strange sense of deja vu while walking through the dimly lit Metro tunnels amid all of the zombie-like commuters and tourists. It was just like playing Fallout 3, set in a post-apocalyptic version of our nation’s capital. There are much fewer mutants in real life, though.

It turns out you were getting a deal when the PlayStation 3 sold for $599. It actually cost $840 to make, according to Business Week (via ZiggyTek, via friend Steve Hopstaken). That was for the 60GB model. The $499 20GB version? It cost Sony $805 to make. Similarly, the originally $399 Xbox 360 really cost $470 for Microsoft to make. 

Why? The companies were hoping for long-term sales to make up for the initial loss. Since both companies also develop games for their systems and, more importantly, earn money from licensing, accessories and related services, such as Xbox Live, it’s a bold business model that’s not uncommon in the industry. With estimated worldwide console sales of close to 31 million for the 360 and 23 million for the PS3, it seems to have worked. And as the systems have become more popular, they’ve also become cheaper to produce from the early days, when these figures are for. “Falling prices on components turned [Microsoft’s] $71 per-unit loss of 2005 into a $76 per-unit profit by the end of 2006,” Business Week says.

Here, according to Business Week, are other popular gadgets and what they cost when they were introduced vs. the actual cost of their components:

iPhone 3G S
MSRP: $199 (starting)
Actual cost:  $179.16

Palm Pre
MSRP:  $200 (after rebate)
Actual cost:  $137.83

Amazon Kindle 2
MSRP:  $359
Actual cost: $185.49

BlackBerry Storm
MSRP: $249
Actual cost: $202.89

iPod Touch (1G)
MSRP: $299 (8GB), $399 (16GB) 
Actual cost: $147, $179

iMac
MSRP: $1,299 
Actual cost: $898

Finally, the first HD DVD player cost Toshiba $700 in components. It sold the model, the HD-A1, for $499. Talk about an uphill battle. Toshiba didn’t even stand to profit from selling discs. Sure, it would have benefitted in other ways and manufacturing costs would have declined, but it sure put a lot of money on the line in backing the high-def disc format. And now you can find the HD-A1 — with 10 movies on HD DVD! — for less than $35 shipped on eBay.

TAKE THE TECHNOBABBLE MP3 CHALLENGE!
Can you tell the difference between MP3s and the original CD?

Nintendo’s vitamin-fortified Wii system surpassed 20 million units in U.S. sales in May, but things are starting to stagnate for the No. 1 console. While two of May’s top 10 video games were new Wii titles — Electronic Arts’ Sports Active and Nintendo’s Punch Out! — the biggest-selling Wii game (No. 2 overall) was Wii Fit, which is more than a year old. Two other top 10 Wii games, Wii Play and Mario Kart Wii, are also more than  a year old. That’s not good that gamers continually gravitate toward older games on the Wii. It means that new games aren’t keeping current owners interested. That might change with the upcoming release of Nintendo’s flagship titles Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. But those won’t be exactly new ideas, either — although the latter will be a welcome debut on the newer system. Still, is the Wii running out of creative juice?

The fun is back at the annual video-game extravaganza E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), which begins today in Los Angeles. After a few years of media-only invitational conferences, the industry is going back to allowing public access to its showcase of upcoming video games. Big news is being created by The Beatles: Rock Band,  Mass Effect 2 and a motion-controller for the Xbox 360. Check out the official E3 Insider and Minneapolis-based Game Informer for the lastest info.

Meanwhile, the NPD Group passes on these stats related to game downloads from E3, based on the industry tracker’s research:

* 18 percent of Xbox 360 users who also have an Xbox Live Gold membership regularly download digitally from Xbox Live Arcade.
* 10 percent of PS3 users regularly download a game digitally from PlayStation network.
* The number of Xbox Live Gold subscribers in the United States increased by 24 percent from the first quarter of 2008 to the same period in 2009.
* 1 in 5 gamers subscribe to a video game subscription (i.e., an MMO, online website, XBL Gold, online rental subscription).
* 17 percent of games purchased by PC gamers were digitally downloaded.
* The total games subscription market grew by 18 percent in subscribers from Q1 ‘08 to Q1 ‘09.
* Bigfishgames, Steam and RealArcade account for over half (56 percent) of PC digital games sold from July to December ‘08 (including only digital only retailers).

See, now aren’t those stats fun? E3 runs through Thursday, by the way.