Ghost Recon: Wildlands tops NPD March charts

NPD’s March data has revealed that Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands was the best-selling US game in March.

The shooter enjoyed the best launch ever for a Ghost Recon title and the second best ever Tom Clancy launch, falling short only of The Division.

In second place was Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which we know from Nintendo sold 1.3m units last month, becoming the fastest selling Zelda title in the process. Nintendo said at the time that the game sold more copies on Switch than the console itself shifted, although NPD now says that it estimates the attach ratio is about 99 per cent.

That leaves EA’s Mass Effect: Andromeda having to settle for third place, which did beat the launch sales of the series’ first two instalments but not the third.

The launch of Nintendo’s new machine helped the market to a 24 per cent year-on-year increase, hitting $1.36bn. Hardware was up 91 per cent, with console software up five per cent. PC software fell by 25 per cent.

It’s the first time in nine months that total physical game sales haven’t suffered a year-on-year decline.

Nintendo continued to break records in physical software as well as hardware,” NPD’s Sam Naji said. Switch’s packaged software sold 1.3m units, a record high for a Nintendo platform launch and the Switch version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sold over 900,000 packaged units in the launch month. This resulted with an attach rate of 99 percent to the Switch hardware. This is the highest attach rate for any non-bundled title for a new gaming platform since NPD began tracking in 1995.

NPD’s tracked sales for the Zelda franchise has recorded physical sales of just under $1.4bn in revenue from 1995 to the present. And Zelda is the top-selling property of all time within the adventure super-genre, selling 54 per cent more revenue than the next best-selling franchise, Resident Evil.

March 2017 will go down in history books as the month Nintendo broke records. The Nintendo Switch had the biggest hardware launch for a Nintendo platform and the second biggest launch for any video game platform since 1995, the time NPD began tracking this category.”

Here’s the March US Top 20 in full:

1. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands
2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (physical only)
3. Mass Effect: Andromeda
4. Horizon Zero Dawn (physical only)
5. MLB 17: The Show (physical only)
6. Grand Theft Auto V
7. For Honor
8. NBA 2K17
9. Nier: Automata
10. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
11. Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix
12. Battlefield 1
13. 1-2 Switch (physical only)
14. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
15. Overwatch
16. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege
17. Super Bomberman R (physical only)
18. FIFA 17
19. Lego Worlds
20. Madden NFL 17