Beancounters at NPD said that growth in all three categories amounted to an 8 percent year-over-year sales increase from the same month a year ago.

NPD analyst Liam Callahan said physical game sales in February offered a strong sign of "consumer's further transition away from seventh-generation consoles towards the new console generation.

For the first month since the launch of Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One , the best-selling titles in NPD's Top 10 list of console software were all for eight-generation consoles.

Overall, sales of new physical video game software sales rose by seven percent on the strength of 84 percent growth in sales of eighth-gen software.

Console hardware sales decreased by 5 percent year-over-year, but the entire game hardware category grew 10 percent compared with last February. This was thanks to a 153 percent increase in portable hardware sales.

The drop in console sales was the result of a 41 percent loss in dollar sales of seventh-generation hardware. Hardware unit sales for all eighth-generation consoles increased year-over-year with high double-digit increases from January 2015, indicating increasing momentum for this new console generation, Callahan said.

"The first 15 months the PS4 and the XBO combined unit sales have outsold the PS3 and the Xbox 360 combined 15 month totals by close to 60 percent."