September 2022 NPD: Sports games top charts, hardware sales soar

While the post-2021 bust continues for the video game industry, hardware sales are looking particularly promising. According to industry-tracking firm The NPD Group, hardware spending is up, while year-on-year spending is still in the negative. Sports games are also taking their place as the fall best-sellers, as is typical. Other new titles are reaching for the top of the charts, including Splatoon 3 and The Last of Us Part 1.

“U.S. consumer spending on video game content, hardware and accessories reached $4.1 billion during the month of September 2022, a decline of 4% when compared to the same month a year ago,” said NPD analyst Mat Piscatella.

The rise in hardware sales is largely thanks to the increased supply of the PlayStation 5. It’s not quite so hard to find as before, and it ranked first in both unit and dollar sales. Hardware is one of the areas of consistent growth in the last few months.

Piscatella added, “Year-to-date total video game spending across content, hardware and accessories is now 8% lower than 2021, at $38.4 billion.”

September 2022 NPD: Top 20 best-selling games of the month in the U.S.

NPD tracks physical sales at retailers, but it also gets digital data directly from publishers. Not every company participates. For example, Nintendo doesn’t share its first-party sales, and Activision Blizzard does not provide its Battle.net sales.

These charts are sorted by dollar sales — not number of units sold. And this is for full-game sales and does not include in-game spending.

The best-selling games list is all over the place this month — a mix of new releases and lower-ranked games made a jump in the rankings. It’s no longer just Elden Ring and LEGO Star Wars dominating the charts, as they’ve done for most of the year. Last month’s release Saints Row continues to rank well, and Marvel’s Spider-Man is still swinging high (sorry) on its PC release.

Some of the older games getting a rank boost include Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot. The new interest in Valhalla likely comes from a recent update, as well as Ubisoft’s early September conference, which revealed the future of the AC franchise. Similarly, Bandai Namco delivered news about updates to Kakarot at the recent Tokyo Game Show, which is likely why it also jumped up a few ranks.

FIFA 23

You might notice a theme to the games at the top of the list. Madden, NBA and FIFA games are all up there, making it a pretty sports-heavy month. This isn’t a surprise, though. If you look at the charts from NPD for September 2021, the same three franchises are in the top three spots (not in the same order, though). It’s also the swan song of the FIFA games series, which will live under the new title EA Sports FC.

Splatoon 3

Several new games are ranking on the list this month, including Splatoon 3, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, The Last of Us Part 1 and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle. Given that these are all tied to popular franchises, it’s no surprise that they did well. Splatoon 3, in particular, sold several million copies in Japan within three days of launch. The above ranking is particularly impressive since Nintendo doesn’t include digital sales in its rankings.

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September 2022 NPD: Top 10 best-selling games of the last 12 months

September 2022 NPD: Top 10 best-selling Nintendo-platform games in the U.S.

September 2022 NPD: Top 10 best-selling PlayStation-platform games in the U.S.

September 2022 NPD: Top 10 best-selling Xbox-platform games in the U.S.