July is not a big month for video games, and it’s no surprise to find that there’s only one new entry in the US sales top 10. Although the results are a little more complicated than they first appear.
Lego Jurassic World is officially the number one selling all-formats game, but chart tracker NPD doesn’t included bundled sales in their top 10. If they did, apparently Batman: Arkham Knight would still ‘easily’ be number one.
Which you count as number one barely seems to matter though, as both are published by Warner Bros. They’re the top publisher so far this year in the US, with sales up over 200 per cent on 2014 (in part because they publish The Witcher 3 in North America).
In terms of hardware sales the PlayStation 4 was once again the number one selling console, although there’s no clue how far ahead it was of its rivals. However, Xbox One sales were up 44 per cent on July 2014 and 3DS sales in 2015 have been up 35 per cent on the first seven months of last year.
According to NPD, combined Xbox One and PlayStation 4 hardware sales are almost twice as high as combined sales of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 after the same 21 month period.
Despite that, overall retail video game sales were only up 6 per cent on last year, with hardware sales described as seeing ‘modest’ growth and software sales ‘flat’.