Sales figures for the month of November show that predictions of COD’s demise were premature as Infinite Warfare claims top spot on the charts. Battlefield 1 is in second place, and Titanfall 2 is in fifth.
Who wins in all these big-budget shooter wars anyway? These are the best FPS games on PC.
The data comes from US sales tracker NPD, who capture physical game sales as well as digital sales from Steam and the Xbox and PlayStation stores. Only certain publishers share their results with NPD, however, with Blizzard among the big names who decline to do this, so their charts are partial.
Caveats out of the way, it’s significant that COD’s expected decline (predicted in the #RIPCOD hashtag) hasn’t really happened, and that Titanfall 2 has rallied to fifth after entering NPD’s charts way down in ninth place at launch. Helped by heavy discounts and strong reviews, EA’s faster-paced shooter outsold NBA 2K17, Madden NFL 17 and Watch Dogs 2, and was only kept from fourth place by Pokémon Moon. That’s not at all bad given that Pokémon Sun (third place) and Moon together broke sales records for the Nintendo franchise after the boost of Pokémon Go this summer.
And yet Nintendo was the only company that had an unqualifiedly good month, as November game sales in general suffered a sharp decline year-on-year. “Software spending in November 2016 declined by 19 percent compared to this time last year,” says NPD analyst Sam Naji. “The decline can be fully attributed to the top three selling games which, combined, sold 43 percent less than the top three games from last November. Combined spending across all other titles grew 12 percent in November compared with a year ago.”
On PC specifically, the drop was even worse, with sales revenue down 28 percent on November last year.
Here’s the top ten chart for game sales:
- Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
- Battlefield 1
- Pokémon Sun*
- Pokémon Moon*
- Titanfall 2
- NBA 2K17
- Madden NFL 17
- Watch Dogs 2
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim*
- FIFA 17
* No digital sales data available for this game.
Many thanks to VentureBeat.