MultiVersus was the best-selling game in the U.S. last month, despite being a free-to-play title, due to its premium Founder’s Pack.
The Founder’s Packs for MultiVersus came in three forms: a $39.99 standard edition, a $59.99 Deluxe edition, and a $99.99 Premium edition. These packs could be purchased to grant players things like character tokens for instant fighter unlocks, exclusive banners, and the premium in-game currency, Gleamium. It seems these packs sold extremely well in the U.S. as they brought in enough money to make MultiVersus the best-selling title in the U.S. in July, according to the latest NPD numbers.
Mat Piscatella, the executive director of The NPD Group, which is a video game sales and trends analyst group, released his monthly thread on the video game market for the month prior, this time for July 2022. As a result, we know the top 10 best-selling games in the U.S. last month (digital sales not included):
- MultiVersus
- Elden Ring
- Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3
- Call of Duty: Vanguard
- MLB: The Show 22
- Mario Kart 8
- Digimon Survive
- Minecraft
- F1 22
You can check out the full list, which includes 20 games, here:
US NPD PREMIUM GAMES – July 2022 Top 20 Sellers pic.twitter.com/a2YXDdqwp0
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) August 19, 2022
As for individual platforms, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was the best-selling Switch game, Elden Ring the best-selling PlayStation game, and MultiVersus the best-selling on Xbox. You can check out the top 10 for each platform in Piscatella’s thread.
Elsewhere in the July 2022 NPD thread, Piscatella says the PlayStation 5 led the market in hardware spending during both July and 2022 year-to-date, but that the Switch sold the most units in both time periods. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S dollar sales each experienced double-digit percentage growth when compared to a year ago, too, likely due to increased supply to meet the ever-growing demand of these consoles. Overall, video game hardware dollar sales increased by 12% when compared to a year ago, to $362 million, but year-to-date spending on hardware is down 7%, to $2.5 billion.
In terms of video game accessories, spending is down 22% compared to July 2021, to $148 million. Year-to-date accessory spending is down 15%, too, at $1.2 billion. The best-selling accessory in July was the Midnight Black DualSense and the best-selling accessory year-to-date is the Xbox Elite Series 2 controller.
For more about July 2022 video game sales, be sure to check out Piscatella’s entire thread here.