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US: NPD Reveals The Best Selling Video Games From 1995 – 2017

Mat Piscatella, from the sales tracking group the NPD, has given us all an insight into video game sales in the United States from 1995 all the way up to 2017. In recent times the best-selling games have been from the Call of Duty series which is published by Activision, however that run was broken by Grand Theft Auto V by Rockstar in 2013. You can view the list of the best-selling games in the United States, below.

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20 thoughts on “US: NPD Reveals The Best Selling Video Games From 1995 – 2017”

      1. Red Dead Redemption 2 has already sold 17 million copies. By the time Smash comes out it will have passed the number of Switches out there. It’s not happening.

    1. It’s the right call, really. People bought the system & the game just so happened to come with said system. No one bought the console thinking “I bought this for the game, not for the system.” So Wii Sports should be disqualified by default. And this goes for any game that’s bundled with a system. If we’re gonna bolster Wii Sports sales with it being bundled with the Wii system, we’d have to bolster the sales of EA’s Star Wars Battlefront with the sales of the PS4 that had the game bundled with it.

      1. Disagree with this for two reasons. First software moves hardware. Nobody buys a system unless there’s a game they want to play on it. Typically, this wouldn’t be enough because it would be easy to buy the system for a different game and for the pack-in to be something you never would have purchased otherwise.

        However the Wii is an exception. It had a pretty low software attach rate and Wii Sports was a VERY big deal at the time. It seemed many people bought a Wii just for Wii Sports, which was integral to the console’s identity. Even nursing homes had a Wii for the bowling, with no other games at all.

        If the Wii sold for $200 and Wii Sports for $50 instead of a $250 bundle, it would probably have an almost 1:1 attach rate with the system, and even if it didn’t, still easily be in the running for best selling game that year.

      1. Honestly, it has to be up there. A ton of casuals bought wii’s for Wii Sports alone. Look at how well Wii Sports Resorts did, an that’s a closer guage to what Wii Sports did, or could’ve done.

        1. I looked it up and it’s at a total of over 40m sales so yeah, it is pretty high up there in sales. But this list is going by yearly sales, not the overall sales. And I highly doubt Wii Sports sold that number in one, single year. If I’m being generous, it probably lost to the games on that list that sold more than it by maybe a few million so it’s not like Wii Sports was getting obliterated.

  1. Hell, so much COD. This list makes me feel like even more of a video game elitist. The only good games on that list past the 90s are the GTA ones.

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