I’m surprised there is no thread for this… Facts follow.
The NPD December 2020 report has been released, and it finds total industry spending up 25% year-over-year, and up 27% for the entire year. In December, the market pulled in $7.7 billion, and $56.9 billion for the year.
Hardware dollar sales reached $1.35 billion during December, up 38% year-over-year (yoy), making it the highest total December month since 2013 when $1.37 billion was pulled in.
Annual hardware dollar sales totaled $5.3 billion, 35% higher yoy, and the most since $5.6 billion was reached in 2011.
Nintendo Switch was the best-selling hardware platform in units and dollars for the month and the year, with annual dollar sales the second-highest for a platform in US history. Only the 2008 dollar sales of Wii were higher.
PlayStation 5 was the second best-selling console in dollar sales, while PlayStation 4 ranked second in units sold.
In software, half of the top 20 best-selling games of December 2020 were published by Nintendo.
Marvel’s Avengers being the number 11 selling title of 2020 is a surprise to me. I thought that got a poor reception?
Call of Duty games outselling Animal Crossing for the year is also a surprise to me. Especially the new one. I would have expected the strong sales of Animal Crossing throughout the summer and fall would exceed the new Call of Duty’s sales, which has only been out for a month or so.
Edit: Ooh wow, I didn’t know FIFA titles sold well in the U.S. now too. That used to not be the case, right? I’m sure it probably still sells a lot less than in other regions, but the 15th best selling game in 2020 in this region has got to be very good.
Call of Duty’s sales across multiple platforms can easily exceed the sales of a single game on a single platform simply because the possible base of purchasers is larger. It’s also the most popular series of games in the world even if this forum would like to ignore that.
FIFA has been massive in all territories for a very long time now because it’s the most faithful to its sport of all sports games and football (soccer) is the World’s game.
As for Marvel’s Avengers, it got a poor reception here (and rightfully so) but that rarely stops sales to regular Joes. They haven’t played a hundred games just like it so they don’t see the cookie cutter design it abides by as a detriment the way people here might.
IIRC, Nintendo’s online sales through the eShop aren’t included in these figures (or they haven’t been to date, so unless NPD got a hold of them at year-end, I’d assume they still aren’t accounted for).
Pretty much the same deal for me. The only physical games I bought for Switch are BOTW and Super Mario 3D All-Stars, the latter mostly due to its timed-exclusivity.
That is a limited time release? I did not know that! Do I want to buy Mario 64 again, really? And I still have Mario Galaxy 1&2 on the Wii (which I can never play due to requiring the TV).
I’ve already tabbed Oddyssey, and am getting the Bowsers Fury since I never had 3D world since I skipped WiiU. So I don’t really need more Mario. But they are so very good…
Yeah, it’s leaving the eShop on March 31 for some baffling reason. Physical copies have a limited production run too, but it shouldn’t be hard to pick it up later as it likely sold millions of copies.
I guess we know digital sales on the Switch are high at Qt3 compared to physical game sales, but we don’t know for sure if that’s true in general because Nintendo doesn’t share digital store sales.
And I guess we don’t know how far behind number 3 on the list is compared to number 1.
We do know from Nintendo’s own reporting that Animal Crossing sold 26.04 million copies worldwide - including digital sales - in its first six months on the market (March 30th-September 30th), but yeah, nothing for the US by itself.
Sure, and single platform
Vs multi platform matters. I could be wrong, of course, but I would absolutely be willing to wager that the total sales (physical/ digital) for Animal Crossing exceed single platform performance for either COD game.
But it’s hard to say with the variable and incomplete reporting.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War was the best selling digital release in the history of the franchise. When combined with number one placement on these charts it is fairly safe to say that Animal Crossing did not surpass it in any way in sales, dollars or units. It also was $69.99 base price on PS5 and Xbox Series.
I mean by the numbers COD MW sold 30 million units. That seems to be near historical series highs. So the Cold War one is probably a little over 30 million, but certainly under 40. 32-33 million probably reasonable estimate.
Which is, yes, more. But if you tally single platform (which was my comment) meaning only PlayStation, or only Xbox, or only PC, I doubt any of those are more than Animal Crossing on their own.
