Analysts have warned that a slump in games industry sales in the US during March “may continue for several months”.

The forecasts follows the release of the NPD Group’s March sales data for the US, which showed software sales down 17 percent and hardware sales down 18 percent year-over-year.

“Sales were much weaker than we expected, and may signal that tough year-over-year comparisons are finally having an impact,” Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter said in response to the March sales data. “We believe investor concern may be heightened, with double-digit negative sell-through implying that the video game consumer has “rolled over”.

“The weak March results follow strong sales in prior months with last month’s +9%, January’s +10%, December’s +16%, November’s +11% and October’s +35%. In addition, combined next generation console and handheld hardware unit sales were down 19% year-over-year with 2.0 million hardware units sold in the month, giving us less confidence about the a reversal in software sales over the near term, especially given tough comps for the next four months.”

Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Markets noted: “… The video game industry continues to exhibit a challenging pattern of sales concentrated among a small group of top-tier software publishers and the firstparty platform holders, leaving little room for second-tier video games. Importantly, we continue to expect the next several months will exhibit y/y declines…”

However, both analysts believe the market will rebound later in the year.

“We expect the negative sales trend to reverse by May, and continue to believe that the video game software sector remains highly recession-resistant, said Pachter, while Sebastian forecast that the market would continue to show signs of a decline “before rebounding to positive growth in 2H09”.

Despite the March sales slump, total US industry sales for the first quarter of the year have now reached $4.25 billion, the same total generated at this point in 2008, which went on to be a record-breaking year.