Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled holds the top in the UK

Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fuelled, a remake of Naughty Dog’s classic 1999 carting game, retained top spot on this week’s UKIE/GfK sales chart. It marks the games fourth time that it has been on the top of the UK weekly chart, not consecutive though.

Available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fuelled appears to have successfully tapped into the market for nostalgia gaming and is demonstrating sustained sales.

A sign of just how keen gamers are to revisit past games and favorite childhood characters is the presence of a second Crash Bandicoot title in the charts. The N Sane Trilogy has pushed back into the top ten courtesy of a week-on-week sales rise of 27% and charts at eight.

Crash Bandicoot is not the only cartoon platformer to enjoy success in this week’s charts. Mario features heavily in three Nintendo Switch exclusives, Super Mario Maker 2 (#2 in the charts), Mario Kart 8: Deluxe (#3 in the charts) and Super Smash Bros Ultimate (#9 in the charts).

The GfK charts only count unit sales but were they based on revenue Super Mario Maker 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe would both outperform Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fuelled – the higher price point of both Switch exclusives mean they claimed more revenue overall.

A further indication of how important criteria is to the rankings on a chart is the fact that Minecraft takes two places in the top ten: the Switch edition of the game charts at #7 and the PlayStation edition charts at #10. Since these platforms of Minecraft have different publishers, GfK rules state that these must be considered separate games, but were the unit sales bundled together Minecraft would displace Crash Team Racing at the top of the charts.

This summer has widely been acknowledged as a quiet period for new games, This is borne out by the remainder of the top ten, with long established titles like GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 filling out the chart. F1 2019, released this summer, is sandwiched between the two Rockstar games, in fifth place, showing that at least one new release has made a mark.

A more extended list of top sellers can be found here.