Nintendo's Wii Sports Resort was the bestselling video game in the U.S. last month, moving more than a half million copies—and Wii MotionPlus add-ons—with one exception. It was actually outsold by EA Sports NCAA Football 10.*

* Combined, that is. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of this year's NCAA Football joined forces to sell over 613,000 copies, besting Wii Sports Resort in multi-SKU semantics. Across all platforms, the NPD Group says, EA Sports' college footballer moved over 689,000 units. I smell sequel!

The line up is, like most months, Nintendo platform heavy. Seven of the top ten games are Wii or Nintendo DS titles, including plenty of evergreen entries like New Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart Wii.
Complete numbers and hardware after the break..

Here are July 2009's bestselling games, from the NPD Group.

01. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) - 508,200
02. NCAA Football 10 (Xbox 360) - 376,500
03. NCAA Football 10 (PS3) - 237,400
04. Wii Fit (Wii) - 164,300
05. Mario Kart Wii (Wii) - 156,600
06. Mario Kart DS (DS) - 132,200
07. Pokemon Platinum (DS) - 116,400
08. Fight Night Round 4 (Xbox 360) - 116,400
09. New Super Mario Bros. (DS) - 101,800
10. EA Sports Active (Wii) - 96,800

All that spending amounted to $436.99 million by U.S. consumers, off 26% from the previous year.

Anita Frazier, NPD analyst, has some bad news for some portions of the industry. "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 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% (or more) higher than the last five months of last year."

That means Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 really has its work cut out for it.

"While year-to-date results are weak, there are some big titles set to be released over the next several months, including Madden this month, which should help spur sales," Frazier notes. "The worst comps should be behind us, and looking beyond August we have The Beatles: Rock Band, Halo 3: ODST, and of course, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to look forward to."

And for Hardware...

Hardware sales fell across the board, with the Wii, PSP and PlayStation 3 seeing the biggest year-over-year declines.

While Nintendo managed to dominate on the portable front — the Nintendo DS and DSi sold 538,900 units combined according to the NPD Group — the Wii didn't have a great July. It sold a little more than a quarter million units last month, less than half of what it did in July of 2008.

PSP and PlayStation 3 sales tell a similar story. Sony's handheld platform sold 122,800 in July, with its PS3 lagging just behind with 121,800 units sold. A stark change from last year, when the PlayStation 3 was enjoying better sales than the Xbox 360 during the summer. This July, however, Microsoft's console dipped only slightly in comparison to its competitors.

Will rumored hardware price drops on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 help reverse the video game industry's fortunes?

Here's how the hardware race went down in July, according to the NPD Group.

• Nintendo DS - 538,900
• Wii - 252,200
• Xbox 360 - 202,900
• PSP - 122,800
• PlayStation 3 - 121,800
• PlayStation 2 - 108,000

All
told, U.S. consumers snapped up $280.94 million worth of video game hardware in July. That's a 37% drop from the year prior, likely ensuring that the industry won't come close to matching its record breaking revenue in 2008.

"Hardware sales have slowed considerably on nearly every platform," NPD analyst Anita Frazier points out. "The Xbox 360 is the only console system showing a unit sales increase year-to-date, while the NDS has the highest sales of all hardware platforms both for the month, and year-to-date."