Tag: Best-Selling Games

Bite-Sized Game History: Obscure Sales Ranking Charts from NPD’s Mat Piscatella

Last year around this time, The NPD Group’s Mat Piscatella shared some historical sales charts of the “Best-Selling Games in the US” from a wide variety of modern and classic platforms (including the Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, and more).

Perhaps this means it’ll become a regular thing, as Piscatella popped up earlier today with another batch of charts, this time slicing the data from a few “obscure” corners of the industry.

Anyone have an obscure sales ranking chart they'd like to see?

— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) November 25, 2019

[Tweet Removed – View at Internet Archive]

Taking requests from his Twitter followers, Piscatella’s research pointed him towards Nokia’s ill-fated N-Gage handheld, as well as popular third-party games on Nintendo platforms, and RPGs on the PlayStation. Finally, one person wanted to see the sales chart from the (sort of) uneventful February 1996.

All four charts offered plenty of surprises, which you can see for yourself in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…

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Bite-Sized Game History: Exploring the US’s Best-Selling Games from the 1990s to Now

Using data from The NPD Group’s vast archive, Mat Piscatella recently shared some historical data on the best-selling video games from the 1990s to today.

Tracking the weekend box office results has become something of a spectator sport for moviegoers of all stripes since the lists were introduced in the early 1980s. Arguing about the financial merits of Star Wars, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Titanic, and Avatar became just as important as discussing each film’s critical reception.

You won’t find this sort of organized ranking of moneymakers in the video game industry, but the closest analogue would have to be the monthly Best-Seller Lists published by The NPD Group. However, the proprietary nature of this report means that the picture will always be incomplete.

Using data from the analyst firm’s vast archive, Mat Piscatella recently tried to pull back the curtain a little bit by sharing the list of best-selling games on several legacy consoles (the Saturn, the original PlayStation, the Nintendo 64, the Game Boy Color, and the Dreamcast) and a nearly defunct handheld (the Vita). He also examined the best-selling games through September 2018 on two modern consoles (the PS4 and Xbox One) and published a list of the top-selling titles for each year from 1995 to 2017.

It’s a very interesting collection of information, and the lists provide our best window yet into what games were considered popular in the United States in the 1990s and into today.

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