See if you can contain your shock.
The NPD results are in for software sales in both December and all of 2015 and once again, a game with Call of Duty in the title leads the way.
The CoD franchise has now been the top-selling franchise in North America for seven years in a row, as Activision said in a recent statement. The only exception was Grand Theft Auto V , which stole the crown back in 2013. But no game was able to compete with Call of Duty: Black Ops III in 2015. Said Activision senior vice president Rob Kostich:
"Call of Duty: Black Ops III was the top selling title of 2015 globally by a wide-margin in both units and dollars sold-thru. This also marks the seventh year in a row that Call of Duty has been the No. 1 selling franchise in North America, according to NPD. In fact, Call of Duty has surpassed 250 million units sold life-to-date worldwide. This achievement is thanks to the amazing experiences created by all of our development teams, and would not be possible without the incredible passion from the Call of Duty community. We congratulate Treyarch on creating an incredibly engaging and an enormously fun game with Black Ops III and look forward to what's to come in 2016."
Same ol' same 'ol. Anyway, the top 5 for both December and the year are pretty similar with Black Ops III , Star Wars: Battlefront , Fallout 4 and Madden NFL 2016 all making the cut. Overall, new software sales for December dropped 4 percent compared to December 2014 (down to $1.23 billion from $1.28 billion), due mostly to a huge 40 percent decrease in portable game sales. For the full year, software totals fell 3 percent, from $5.47 billion to $5.29 billion; PS4/Xbox One sales jumped 52 percent but it wasn't enough to offset the portable software slump of 34 percent and the 53 percent drop in PS3/Xbox 360 titles.
Here are the top 10 best-selling games in the U.S. for December and for 2015, and please remember that the NPD only tracks physical sales. …which they're really going to have to remedy ASAP because the results get less and less accurate as time goes on, given the continuous rise of digital sales. The platforms in parentheses are ranked by number of copies sold on each console.
Best-Selling Physical Games in US for December 2015
Best-Selling Physical Games in US for All of 2015