Every month, The NPD Group releases sales figures of video games that were sold at retail. Their data lets us know how many units a game or console sold. The problem with The NPD’s numbers is that they don’t cover games that are sold digitally. The digital market is huge and not counting it creates an inaccurate representation of videogame sales. Thanks to a new partnership between The NPD Group and analyst firm EEDAR, digital sales will no longer be left out.

The July NPD’s were released last week. The one thing we can take away from the results were that software sales saw a slump and the Xbox 360 S helped consoles sales tremendously. As we approach the holiday season, more big name games are scheduled to released. Before the end of the year we will see Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: Reach, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and LittleBigPlanet 2 all released very close to each other. However EEDAR (Electronic Entertainment Design and Research) analyst Jesse Divnich believes it will take more than software sales to recover from the sales slump of the summer.

When Microsoft first announced that Kinect will cost $150, many were not surprised, but others felt that the price is a too steep. In fact, one of our writers believes that it may lead to its downfall. However, an analyst from think tank Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) believes that Kinect is priced appropriately.

With folks having fewer dollars in their pockets to spend overall, a report from Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) indicates there are more games coming out at lower prices. The research group suggests publishers may have to continue that trend, at least in the short term, as the economy gets hit harder.

According to analyst Jesse Divnich, from the EEDAR’s report:

“As the Xbox 360 and the PS3 hardware continue to decline in price, more non-traditional, casual, family, and price sensitive gamers (noting these demographics sometimes overlap) will likely adopt these systems, which will increase the demand for cheaper titles.”

Another important issue is…

Nothing can stop the Mario-driven money train known as Nintendo.

The company proved that at the end of 2008 when the Wii sold more than 2 million units in the month of November alone.

Before the NPD numbers for December 2008 are released, Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) analyst Jesse Divnich is predicting the games industry has made $2.7 billion in sales in December 2009 with the Wii and DS accounting for half of that number. Simply put, if it weren’t for Nintendo the video game industry would have taken a brutal beating compliments of the weakening economy.

Divnich believes those sales prove a…