The NPD Group, a market research firm in the United States, has released their statistics for July revealing that the Nintendo Switch was the number one selling console over that 31 day period. This achievement is an impressive feat given that the console has been selling out frequently as Nintendo has its usual production and supply chain issues.
In anticipation of the launch of Splatoon 2 (a 4v4 multiplayer game), Nintendo had ensured that Switch consoles were stockpiled and available. This surge in availability would have helped to ensure sales continued smoothly for July. Although it is also important to keep in mind that the Switch was only released earlier this year, so is a much younger console than the others and also potential Xbox buyers may be waiting for the Xbox One X.
Talking of Splatoon 2, it only went on sale on the 21st of July, but it was the most sold game for the month. It beat out Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy and the still surprisingly high sales of Grand Theft Auto V. Nintendo had three other games in the top 20 with The Legends of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at number five, Mario Kart 8 at number seven, and ARMS at number 17. Zelda:BotW also managed to hold the number two spot for the most sold games this year over all platforms.
Note: NPD only measure physical sales within the US, and this skews the results somewhat. Due to Sony and Microsoft having more advanced digital download libraries compared to the poorly handled DRM on Nintendo consoles — and Nintendo games having good resale value — we suspect that a disproportionate amount of Switch game sales are physical copies.
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I grew up in a family surrounded by technology, starting with my father loading up games for me on a Commodore 64, and later on a 486. In the late 90's and early 00's I started learning how to tinker with Windows, while also playing around with Linux distributions, both of which gave me an interest for learning how to make software do what you want it to do, and modifying settings that aren't normally user accessible. After this I started building my own computers, and tearing laptops apart, which gave me an insight into hardware and how it works in a complete system. Now keeping up with the latest in hardware and software news is a passion of mine.
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Craig Ward, 2017-08-18 (Update: 2017-08-18)