January NPD: Black Ops II Still Top Dog

Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Call of Duty: Black Ops II remains on top, as if anyone is really shocked.

According to the January NPD numbers, the insanely popular shooter retained the #1 slot in the US in the first month of 2013. Far Cry 3, Just Dance 4, NBA 2K13 and Madden NFL 13 round out the top five. 

As a site note, the January 2013 reporting period was actually five weeks ahead instead of four due to the NPD Group's adherence to the National Retail Federation calendar. It's basically known as "leap week" and only happens once every five or six years. Therefore, overall sales for January rose 9% to $834.7 million, but if you make the correction for that leap week, you actually get a sales drop of 13% to $667.6 million.

However, as NPD analyst Liam Callahan says:

"These sales figures represent new physical retail sales of hardware, software and accessories, which account for roughly 50 percent of the total consumer spend on games. When you consider our preliminary estimate for other physical format sales in January such as used and rentals at $141 million, and our estimate for digital format sales including full game and add-on content downloads including microtransactions, subscriptions, mobile apps, and the consumer spend on social network games at $382 million, we would estimate the total consumer spend in January to be over $1.3 billion."

Hardware sales dropped 17% taking the adjustment into consideration, and software dove 19%. Interestingly, the critically acclaimed Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch just missed the top 10 sales chart, coming in 11th. But it actually ranked 7th on an individual SKU basis, so that's good news. Love to see the gems that aren't shooters or action/adventure games do well!

Tags: npd sales, video game sales, january npd, gaming industry

2/14/2013 11:18:54 PM John Shepard

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