Bad news for the Research Triangle’s video-game sector – one of the largest gaming hubs in the country: People continue to buy fewer games and related hardware as well as accessories.

U.S. retail sales of video game software, hardware and accessories declined 24 percent to $848.3 million in September from a year earlier, researcher NPD Group Inc. reported Thursday.

The falloff marked the 10th-consecutive month of declining sales as the gaming world holds off buying ahead of the release of Nintendo’s Wii U console next month

NPD Group reported sales of $1.11 billion a year earlier.

Sales of video games themselves, excluding PC titles, fell 18 percent to $497.4 million.

The September decline was less severe, however, than the 28 percent drop forecast by Cowen & Co. analyst Doug Creutz.

The decline was led by shrinking sales of game consoles, which fell 39 percent to $210.9 million, NPD said.

Software sales fell 18 percent to $497.4 million even with strong gains in Electronic Arts Inc.’s “Madden NFL 13” football game, which sold 11 percent more units in its debut month than the previous version last year, NPD said.

The best-selling title of the month was “Madden NFL 13,” followed by Take 2 Interactive Software Inc.’s, “Borderlands 2” and EA’s “FIFA Soccer 13.”

Video-game industry sales this year have shrunk as fewer consumers buy packaged titles, which sell for about $60 each. Sharp gains in games played on mobile devices have failed to offset an overall decline. Taking into account digital downloads, consumers probably spent almost $1.6 billion on games last month, NPD analyst Liam Callahan estimated.

New video-game sales for this month will probably decline 5 percent from a year ago, which would be the best result for the industry in nearly 12 months, Arvind Bhatia, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc., said in a research note.

The industry is gearing up for the peak holiday shopping season beginning in November. Among nearly a dozen tent-pole game titles from major developers, Microsoft Corp. releases the next installment of its $3 billion Halo franchise, while Activision Blizzard Inc. will begin selling “Call of Duty: Black Ops II.”

Console Sales

Microsoft held the lead in console sales in September for the 21st consecutive month. The Redmond, Washington-based company said in a separate statement that U.S. retailers sold 270,000 of its Xbox consoles last month. That’s down 38 percent from 438,000 players sold a year earlier.

Nintendo Co., based in Kyoto, Japan, said in its own e- mailed statement that sales of software for its 3DS handheld machines jumped 89 percent from a year earlier, without citing specific sales figures.

The gain was helped by titles such as “New Super Mario Bros. 2,” which sold more than 295,000 units in September, its second month on the market, Nintendo said, citing NPD figures. The statement didn’t disclose hardware sales for the 3DS and the older Wii console.

The video-game machine maker, trying to recover from an annual loss, will begin selling its Wii U home console Nov. 18. It’s the industry’s first new console since 2006.

Sony Corp. often doesn’t report monthly figures, and didn’t for September.

(Bloomberg and The AP contributed to this report.)