U.S. video game revenue nearly hit an all-time high in June, thanks to The Last of Us: Part II launch and continued interest in Nintendo’s Switch.
Video game hardware, software, and accessories sales topped $1.2 billion last month, representing a 26% year-over-year gain, NPD reported on Friday. It was the second-biggest June sales tally of all time, just behind June 2009’s $1.3 billion in spending. So far this year, players have spent $6.6 on gaming, nearly matching 2010’s six-month record of $7 billion.
June’s performance was driven by a 49% year-over-year leap in software spending to $570 million. Buy Now was the top-selling game last month and is already the third-best-selling game of 2020. Buy Now , which has dominated the top-selling games chart since its launch last year, landed in the second spot.
Buy Now took third place and Buy Now fell from second place in May to the fourth slot last month. Buy Now rounded out the top five.
The 2019 Nintendo Switch title Buy Now landed in the 835th spot for top-selling games in May, NPD said. Last month, it soared to 19th place after retailers replenished their stock of the game.
Accessories sales surged 29% year-over-year to $417 million last month. Microsoft’s Xbox Elite Series 2 Wireless Controller was the top-selling accessory.
On the hardware front, Nintendo’s Switch remained the top-selling console in both unit sales and dollars spent. NPD’s data suggests, however, that consumers may be saving up for the next-generation console cycle. Hardware spending was down 17% year-over-year to $191 million — the first drop since February.
The game industry was one of the few to benefit from the coronavirus pandemic. With players locked in, they’ve turned to video games for entertainment and to reduce stress. Looking ahead, game companies expect that demand to continue and Sony earlier this week doubled its 2020 PlayStation 5 production target from 5 million units to 10 million.
NPD’s provides monthly glimpses into the video game industry’s performance. The research firm’s data includes physical sales of hardware, software, and accessories, as well as digital game sales data game publishers share with the company. NPD doesn’t publicly share game or hardware unit sales data.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.