NPD Group releases charts for best selling games, consoles in January

The NPG Group has released a number of details on how video games and consoles did last month, and here’s a rundown of the results.

In a shocking twist, the best-selling game of January 2021 was—Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War. Crazy, right? Nobody could ever have predicted that. Filling out the top five were a number of other small, niche titles you probably never have heard of, such as Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Here’s the full list of the top 20 best-selling games:

From there (and with less sarcasm), the specific console charts are pretty uneventful as well. The Nintendo chart is full of evergreen first-party titles, Xbox is strong with popular third-party titles, and PlayStation offers those same multi-platform titles mixed in with Sony exclusives.

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Beyond that, NPD Group representative Mat Piscatella gave some additional details on how the industry did in January.

“January 2021 consumer spending across video game hardware, content and accessories achieved a January record $4.7B, 42% higher when compared to a year ago,” Piscatella writes. “Gains were achieved across all spending categories. Sales of video game hardware were 144% higher than January 2020, reaching $319 million. This is the highest total for a January month since the $323 million achieved in January 2011.”

The best-selling hardware for the month will probably also come as no surprise: the Nintendo Switch. With Nintendo’s hybrid still hot, and its two competitors continuing to have supply issues, the Switch won’t be giving up any ground for at least a while longer.

On an interesting final detail, Piscatella noted that the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller was the best-selling accessory of January, while Sony’s Wireless Headset White “was the best-selling Headset/Headphone.”

Source: Mat Piscatella