US Monthly Charts: spending on games in March maintains growth

The latest United States game spending report is out, and as it has for every month this year, spending has grown. March posted an overall gain of 4%, reaching $4.89 billion, while content spending across all sectors was up to $4.25 billion, a 9% increase over February.

Breaking down the impressive gains is a mixture of good and bad news, as 89% of the year-to-year growth came from spending on mobile games. In order, the top earners were Monopoly Go, Royal Match, Roblox, Candy Crush Saga, and Coin Master.

On the console and PC Side, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was the top-seller, already surpassing the total lifetime sales for the first game and its expansion. Capcom’s latest beat out Sony’s Helldivers 2, which only fell to second place, and impressively, after only two months on sale, is the seventh best-selling Sony title of all time in the United States.

Every March new release placed in the top ten, including MLB: The Show 24, Rise of the Ronin, the Nintendo Switch exclusive Rise of the Ronin, Vanillaware’s surprise hit RPG Unicorn Overlord, and in ninth at the end of the pack is WWE 2K24.

Notably, Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones, after only one month in the top 20, has fallen off the chart following poor word of mouth.

The biggest move of the month came from the PlayStation-exclusive Horizon: Forbidden West, going from No. 104 to No. 14 thanks to steep discounts.

Despite the overall good news, hardware spending was down by 30% year over year. In total, consumers spent $392 million on hardware during March. Again, the PlayStation 5 was the top seller, followed by the Nintendo Switch and Microsoft’s Xbox Series consoles in third.

Accessory spending took up some of the slack, posting a gain of 9%, with the Sony PlayStation Dual Sense remaining the top seller, but the sector saw significant gains thanks to headset and speaker spending.