The good news continues to roll for the PS5, with NPD reporting that the console was August 2022’s “best-selling hardware platform in both unit and dollar sales” in the US. This is specifically for the four-week period between July 31 and August 26. Last month, NPD reported that the PS5 was the top-selling console in the US this year.
Madden NFL 23 and Saints Row are the best-selling games for August 2022
https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/1572229670103576576?s=20&t=uMcPfb1pO4Yk-_bTw1agsw
Mat Piscatella, the Executive Director and Video Game Industry Advisor for NPD Group, also shares in a long chain of tweets (a few posted above) that the improved supply of the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles have helped boost video game hardware sales by 14% to $375 million compared to a year ago. In similar fashion to sales numbers from July 2022, both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series also had double-digit percentage growth this month compared to a year ago. While the Switch still holds the top spot for the highest number of units sold in 2022 so far, the PS5 is number one in terms of revenue.
On the flipside, year-to-date spending through August 2022 suffered an overall drop of 9% compared to August 2021. Likewise, sales for video game content dropped from about $33.6 billion to $30.3 billion, while sales for video game hardware dropped from $3 billion to $2.87 billion.
As for the top video games for August 2022 in terms of dollar sales, Madden NFL 23 has ascended to first position in its debut month. This is despite the game receiving middling scores with a Metacritic score of 69 at the time of this writing. Even so, Piscatella remarks that this is the 23rd consecutive year that a Madden NFL game has debuted as the best-selling title in its launch month.
Other notable games in the Top 20 are the Saints Row reboot which, despite all of the bugs, still captured second place and MultiVersus that got punched down into fifth place after being the top game last month. The remaster for Marvel’s Spider-Man swung into third position, while Elden Ring continues to hold strong in fourth place, which is amazing for a game that launched in February this year.
In other news, EA has confirmed that it’s working on several new Marvel games including Iron Man, and the GTA 6 hacking group is actively being pursued by the FBI for multiple cyber crimes.
