Surprised? Yeah, we weren’t either.
According to numbers released by the NPD group, Black Ops II was the best selling game this year. The biggest surprise, however, was the fact that the Xbox 360 dominated the console market with eight of the top ten titles being predominately sold on Microsoft’s console. Of course all of this is subject to some terms as NPD doesn’t track any software sold with consoles, those sold through digital distribution, or used game sales.
Top 10 retail game sold in the United States in 2012 (Parentheses prioritize copies sold per console)
1. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (360, PS3, PC, Wii U)
2. Madden NFL 13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSV, Wii U)
3. Halo 4 (360)
4. Assassin’s Creed III (360, PS3, PC, Wii U)
5. Just Dance 4 (Wii, 360, Wii U, PS3)
6. NBA 2K13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSP, Wii U, PC)
7. Borderlands 2 (360, PS3, PC)
8. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (360, PS3, Wii, PC)
9. Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (Wii, 360, NDS, PS3, 3DS, PSV, PC)
10. FIFA Soccer 13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSV, 3DS, Wii U, PSP)
Unfortunately, that’s about where the good news ends. Overall sales in the industry were down 22% in December, a loss of around $890 million. Most are accrediting this to software sales with 27 percent less releases this year, as analyst Liam Callahan told Gamasutra, however, the releases this year, on average, sold more and generated more profit.
The hardware side of things isn’t looking any better either as the members of NeoGAF have gathered various sources to place a reliable estimate of total consoles sold.
Xbox 360: 1.4M (-17.6%)
3DS: 1.25M (-21.8%)
Wii: 475K (-55.2%)
DS: 470K (-25.4%)
Wii U: 460K
Sony has not released any numbers regarding Playstation 3 sales as of this posting while Microsoft has announced that it sold 1.4 million units which is “more than double the amount of the second place console in the U.S. in the month of December.”
One thing’s for sure, the next few months should be very interesting. Reports are coming that the Playstation 3 has just recently passed the Xbox 360 in number of consoles shipped worldwide as the Xbox 360 finally begins to reel in Nintendo’s Wii as this generations best selling console in the US. Stay tuned.