U.S. best selling video games: Week of October 26, 2019

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has finally released and, as expected, stormed the top charts all over the world, including in the U.S. The physical sales of the Activision’s game are very strong, almost 40% more than the previous release, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, on its first week.

There were four major releases this week, and all of them landed in the first half of the Top 10 charts. With Call of Duty: Modern Warfare taking the top, this year’s iteration of 2K Games’ WWE 2K franchise, WWE 2K20 took the second place. The launch week sales of the game were less by 28% compared to its predecessor last year. The game was significantly criticized in the media and social media for many bugs and flaws, and this may have hurt its sales.

The newly released The Outer Worlds took the third place of the charts. The game is Obsidian’s new IP, which is often compared with the Fallout series and was quite expected by consumers. The timing of the release of the new IP was probably not ideal, given that it has released the same day as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and in the same week as a couple of other big new releases. October 2019 was quite dense with many major releases, November 2019 is expected to be relatively quieter. Releasing Outer Worlds a couple of weeks later may have avoided overlapping with other big titles and provided greater sales, as most of the gamers cannot afford to buy several new games in the same week. The game will probably still perform well after the dust settles in the coming weeks.

NBA 2K20 still performs well. With a 42% week-on-week sale drop, it took the fourth place of the charts. The fourth new release in the Top 10 this week was PS4 exclusive MediEvil. It is a remake of three PlayStation games, originally released in 1998, 2000 on PS1, and in 2005 on PSP. The remake demonstrated an average sales performance, though not bad for a platform exclusive. The retail price of the game is $30/£25, lower than the other tripel-A releases in this week’s chart.

The second half of the chart includes recent releases, such as Ring Fit Adventure, FIFA 20, Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville, and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. The later has had a quite disappointing performance for its publisher, Ubisoft. In a recent call to the shareholders, the CEO of Ubisoft Yves Guillemot announced that the company had had to decrease its operating income targets for this year ten times. Of course, the poor performance of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint was not the only reason for the company’s reduced profits. The major reason is probably that the publisher also delays the release dates of their upcoming Watch Dogs Legion, Gods & Monsters, and Rainbow Six Quarantine till 2020/2021. Though the reason for the delay of these titles is probably the poor quality and numerous problems that were encountered with Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. The publisher probably wants to make sure that the same thing will not happen with the upcoming titles.

Both Ring Fit Adventure for Nintendo Switch and EA’s new Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville perform very well. Ring Fit Adventure has had a sales increase of 12% this week and Battle for Neighborville has had a week-on-week sales decrease of only 6%.

In overall this was a very strong week in terms of sales volumes. Even though there are still a few strong releases expected in November/December 2019, but the weekly sales probably can be expected quieter this season until Christmas.

Below is the US physical games wholesale chart for the week ending on October 26, 2019:

 
Source: WholesGame