Software - GTA IV's Stats Story

As expected, the top-selling game of April 2008 was Grand Theft Auto 4, which was only available for 5 days during NPD's reporting period. With 1.85 million copies on the Xbox 360 and 1 million on the PS3, Rockstar's latest epic crime game took both the #1 and #3 spots on this month's top 10 chart.

 

 

 

 

In the face of Grand Theft Auto's launch, Nintendo systems claimed six of the berths in the top 10. At #2 is Mario Kart Wii, which launched with a steering wheel accessory and sold over 1.1 million copies. The ever-present Wii Play and its bundled Wii remote again placed #4 (its 15th consecutive appearance in the top 10) with 360,000 copies for the month while Super Smash Bros. Brawl – last month's #1 game – dropped to #5 with 326,000 copies.

 

Next at #7 and #8 are the pair of Nintendo DS games, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time, each with 202,000 copies during April 2008. (During their April 2007 launch, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl for the Nintendo DS sold over 1.7 million copies, combined.) Finally, Guitar Hero III for the Nintendo Wii makes another appearance, this time at #9, with only 152,000 units (down from more than 264,000 units in March).

 

The PlayStation 3-exclusive Gran Turismo 5: Prologue sold 224,000 copies in April, taking the #6 spot on the top 10 chart. This is only the second time since its launch that the PlayStation 3 has claimed two spots in the top 10. The first time was November 2007 with the launch of Call of Duty 4 and Assassin's Creed. While the top 10 is not necessarily representative of sales of all software, there is no doubt that multiple titles on the list concurrently carries some symbolic value. It is also worth noting that GT5:P is available as a download directly through Sony's PlayStation Store, and many more than 224,000 copies may have been sold if those downloads were counted. Such availability no doubt affects the retail numbers that the NPD Group measures.

 

Call of Duty 4 on the Xbox 360 clung to the #10 spot, marking its sixth and probably final appearance in the monthly top 10 software chart. Since its launch in November 2007, Call of Duty 4 has sold more than 4 million copies on the Xbox 360 alone.

 

Since last month two shooters have fallen off the chart of top selling software: Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 on Xbox 360 and EA's Army of Two on the Xbox 360 and PS3. Moreover, both of the recent PSP hits, God of War: Chains of Olympus and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, fell out of the top ten. Finally sales of Take Two's Major League Baseball 2K8 dropped enough to keep it from making a second appearance in the top 10.

 

« first‹ previous123456next ›last »