Despite the breakthrough month for Microsoft's Xbox 360, and favorable receptions for new Harry Potter and NCAA Football games, the overall U.S. video-game console market wasn't quite able to get back into growth mode in July. Overall sales of video-game hardware, software and accessories slipped 1 percent, to $846.5 million, according to NPD Group data.

The chart above gives a sense for how the video-game market is still struggling to return to the numbers it was seeing before the onset of the recession.

Breaking down the numbers: Hardware sales were up 12 percent, to $313.8 million, thanks to increases for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, compared with the same month last year. But sales of software (games) declined 8 percent, to $403.3 million, and accessories sales were down 2 percent, to $129.3 million.

NPD analyst Anita Frazier looked on the bright side in an email accompanying the data: "While video game retail sales show a very slight decline versus last July, we have to consider the success of Starcraft II this month, which helped the PC games category to realize a 103% increase in dollars over last July," she wrote. "PC Games and video game industry sales combined for an increase of 4% in revenues as compared to July '09."

The top-selling console game for the month was NCAA Football 11, which sold 368,000 units on the Xbox 360 and another 298,800 on the PlayStation 3. That was followed by Crackdown 2 for the Xbox 360 in the No. 3 slot, Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii, and Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 for the Nintendo DS.

In another bit of good news for Microsoft, the 1600-point Xbox Live card was the best-selling accessory for the fifth consecutive month, according to the NPD data. "The general success of the Points and Subscriptions cards category within Accessories points to the activity that is happening in the industry outside the traditional retail channel," Frazier wrote.