TGO Daily | January 18, 2021 | NPD 2020 Report
Welcome back! I hope you had a tremendous weekend.
On Friday, a big report from Jason Schreier was released about the development of Cyberpunk 2077. It’s an interesting read with some new insight, but I’ve covered that game so much at this point that I’ve opted not to write about it. I encourage you to give it a look though, he ends up interview over 20 employees at the company.
Once again, a big welcome to everyone who subscribed to the newsletter over the last two weeks! Lots of new readers. Hope I’m bringing you some value :)
Until tomorrow,
Adrian
NPD December and 2020 Stats
Every month, we look at the data reported by NPD, which collects sales figures across the entire industry in the United States. On Friday, they released the December report, alongside some interesting stats about 2020 as a whole. All courtesy of Mat Piscatella on Twitter.
Hardware
With the new consoles being released in November and bought en masse for Christmas, December was a big month for hardware. It achieved the highest total for a December month since 2013, when the previous generation was released.
The Nintendo Switch was the best selling console of 2020, despite it being 3.5 years old and competing with the Series X and PlayStation 5. Granted, it had the whole year to sell as opposed to a few months. Perhaps 2021 will be a better indicator. The only time that a console has performed better in a given year was the Nintendo Wii in 2008.
Software
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War was the best selling game in the United States for 2020, as expected, and Modern Warfare took the #2 spot. This marks the 12th consecutive year that it is the best selling gaming franchise.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons took the #3 spot, which doesn’t even include digital sales (maybe it could have dethroned Call of Duty with digital factored in?). It’s also the best physical release for Nintendo since Wii Fit in 2010.
Cyberpunk 2077 was the 19th best selling game of 2020 (without digital sales included, and with only 20 days of tracking). It was #2 for the month of December.
Here’s the top 20 for 2020:
What’s going on with Hitman 3?
There’s been a spark of controversy regarding Hitman 3 this weekend.
Developers IO Interactive had promised players that if they owned Hitman and Hitman 2, they would be able to import that data into Hitman 3 so that all the content from all three games could live in one place. They are essentially set up as DLC, which you are given for free if you already in possession of the games.
For consoles players, this is an easy thing to implement. On PC though, Hitman 3 is a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. So you won’t be able to import the first two games if you only own them on Steam. Hitman 2 isn’t even on the Epic Games Store.
IO acknowledged the issue in a blog post and basically said that players would have to make do. Not a good look for a game coming out in five days.
Thankfully, it looks like this is going to be remedied. Not only did Epic CEO Tim Sweeney mentioned that he was looking to fix the problem, they also tweeted this out:
All things considered, while it may take a bit for those systems to get implemented properly, they handled the situation quite nicely.
Limited Run Games breaks records
You may have heard about a company called Limited Run Games. They take games that are usually digital-only (such as indies who can’t afford a physical release) and give them a “limited run” of a physical boxed copy.
Their most recent run is Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game, which was hotly anticipated and was given special editions that included a bunch of collectors items. The game was made available for the Nintendo Switch and the PlayStation 4.
All of this led to Limited Run announcing that it was their most successful release of all time, selling 25,000 copies in under 3 hours. Woohoo!
If you’re interested in picking up any copy (base game is ~$40), it’s still on sale! Check out their website.
The Grab-Bag
Bungie closing down the Halo portion of their site on February 9th. It contains stats and files for Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo: Reach. Grab them from the site before it goes away forever!
Ubisoft delaying Riders Republic from February 25th to an unspecified date. Expect a lot of delays this year — we’ll be seeing the effects of COVID for a while.
Battle.net got a facelift! Not sure how much of an improvement it is, but I think it looks pretty sleek.
More From TGO
Hey, just wanted to give you the heads up that the audio version of this newsletter is now available on Google Home devices! Most people listen to the daily updates through Alexa, so I’m hoping to branch out a bit more through Google :)
All you have to do is enable my show in your Google News settings. This is a great time to tell a friend about TGO as well, if they have a Home! Appreciate all your support.
Say Hello!
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