Hey everyone, I’m Mariam Sughayer, analyst relations manager here at SCEA. I’m the gal who works with those guys you see quoted in newspapers and news sites all the time talking about the industry; folks like Michael Pachter and Billy Pidgeon.

Today, the much anticipated NPD numbers were released and we’re very excited about how great July was for video games. If you didn’t know, NPD is the organization that tracks sales of videogames in the U.S. According to NPD, the industry continues to boom with sales of $925.52 million dollars for the month of July – that’s a 37% increase for the industry since this time last year.

From a PlayStation perspective, coming out of E3 we were really anticipating a good reaction to our new hardware pricing announced on July 9th, and we were obviously very pleased to see that PS3 sales increased with 159K units sold at retail for the month of July, which puts us up 61% over June numbers.

While I think a lot of that had to do with the new price, I also think there is a great deal of anticipation for the line up of games just around the corner, including Warhawk (Aug. 28), Lair (Sept. 4) and Heavenly Sword (Sept. 12). In fact, September should definitely be a big month for us when you add in the launch of the new slimmer, lighter PSP which will hit store shelves next month.

I’m going to start posting these sales numbers on a regular basis to keep you guys up to date on the business side of things. Thanks to all of you who made July such a great month for PlayStation. I’ll try to post again here in a few weeks.