The June 2021 NPD report has just been published, and as well as detailing figures for the month, it also sums up US gaming sales performance for the first six months of 2021.
Despite the arrival of the Xbox Series X (and S) and Sony PlayStation 5, the Switch was the best-selling games platform in the United States for the first half of the year – in terms of both unit sales and total dollar sales. In the first half of 2021, consumer spending reached a total of $28.9 billion, which marks a 15% increase compared to the first six months of 2020.
The month of June did deliver one surprise, though, with the Xbox Series X and S being the best-selling hardware platform in terms of dollar sales – however, when it comes to units sold, Switch remained in top spot. It’s also worth noting that the PlayStation 5 remains the fastest unit-selling console hardware platform in US history, based on lifetime sales after 8 months on sale (this excludes portables).
The month of June saw video game hardware dollar sales leap by 112% year-on-year, hitting a total of $401M – according to NPD Group’s Mat Piscatella, this is the highest total achieved in a June month since 2008 ($617M).
In terms of software, Sony’s PS5 exclusive was June’s best-selling game in the all-formats chart, while had to settle for 3rd place – even so, launch month dollar sales were the highest ever achieved by a Mario Golf game, beating the total set by 2003’s GameCube outing, Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe held onto 7th place in the June software sales chart, while dropped from 9th to 11th place. , on the other hand, rose one position from 14th to 13th. dropped two places from 13th to 15th, while Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Pokémon Sword & Shield found themselves in 18th and 19th places respectively.
For the Nintendo sales chart – that’s just games sold on Nintendo platforms – the entire top ten for June was comprised of Nintendo-published titles. The only third-party offering was in 10th place, which is published by Nintendo on Switch.
@UltimateOtaku91 Honestly while it IS true people do buy digital games much more than they used in the past, I think people still underestimate even just the psychological incentive for people to have even just the idea of the possibility of having physical “backup” of media when it comes to all-digital consoles. Which is why I suspect those all-digital models don’t seem to have picked up all that much. Console people might indeed buy more digital games than ever, but psychologically they still aren’t there yet and might still not be for a long while.
