November Was A Good Month to Be A Sequel

Retail tracking group NPD released their usual monthly sales chart today, and rather predictably, November’s best selling games were all high profile sequels.

Unsurprisingly, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 broke sales records and scored the top spot for the month of November. Considering November is one of the busiest months for sales in the gaming industry, it’s a pretty big feat to even make it within the top 10, much less be #1. But then again, we’re talking about CoD here, and Activision is already bragging that MW3 is selling even faster than last year’s record breaking Black Ops.

Bethesda, meanwhile, proved that RPG’s still have mainstream appeal, as Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim claimed the second spot on the NPD chart. Despite reports that the game is filled with game-ending bugs and glitches (as is every game of this type,) the latest Elder Scrolls game is the fastest selling title in the series, and despite only being out for a few weeks, is already on track to eclipse the lifetime sales of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Despite Skyrim having about a billion hours worth of content, gamers still had enough time left over to buy other games as well: Ubisoft had a lot to be happy about, with Assassin’s Creed Revelations (read my review here) and Just Dance 3 managing to chart pretty high on the list. It’s not often that you see a 3rd party succeed with both hardcore and casual audiences, but Ubisoft seems to be succeeding where some of the larger publishers have stumbled.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (read my review here,) came in 9th, just behind THQ’s wonderfully batsh*t crazy open-world crime game, Saints Row 3. While NPD no longer releases actual sales numbers, we can gather from Nintendo’s boasting that the game sold at least half a million copies in it’s 1st week on the shelves. Pretty good for a game for a system that was pretty much considered dead for most of the year.

The rest of the list is rounded out by some hold-overs from October, including Sony’s Uncharted 3, WB Interactive’s Batman: Arkham City and EA’s supposed CoD rival, Battlefield 3, all of which continue to enjoy healthy sales despite competition from newer releases. The full list is as follows:

1. Call of Duty (Activision Blizzard)

2. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda)

3. Battlefield 3 (EA)

4. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (Ubisoft)

5. Just Dance 3 (Ubisoft)

6. Madden NFL 12 (EA)

7. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Fortune (Sony)

8. Saint’s Row: The Third (THQ)

9. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Nintendo)

10. Batman: Arkham City (WB Interactive)

While the NPD states that this November set a record for the amount of games actually sold, people generally paid less for these games (waiting on Black Friday deals, I suppose,) so the amount of profit actually made this month wasn’t a substantial increase over previous years. Regarding hardware, the Xbox 360 was once again the victor by a wide-margin.

As I mentioned earlier, every game on the top 10 list is a sequel, and while this would usually be a reason to lament the lack of innovation in the gaming industry, I don’t think anyone can complain about their being too many sequels when they result in quality games like Skyrim, Uncharted, Zelda, or Batman. It’s also worth mentioning that Zelda was the only Japanese developed game to make it to the top ten.