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Amazon UK has provided a list of the best selling games, and related hardware, from 2017. And the top-selling title was, somewhat surprisingly, PS4 exclusive Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy. The retro-powered marsupial bested even the ‘national game’, with FIFA 18 on PS4 coming in second place.
Amazon is only one retailer, but its sheer size makes its ranking intriguing, especially when compared to the market as a whole and given that it mixes hardware and software sales in the same list.
Amazon’s rankings are based on individual SKUs, rather than totalling up sales for a single title – so FIFA 18 hold spots No.2 and No.3 with the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game. That means that Destiny 2 and Call of Duty: WWII drop way down the rankings compared to their GfK rankings for all retail outlets.
Even given that set up, exclusive titles have done especially well for Amazon this year. On the Switch there’s Super Mario Odyssey at No.4, Mario kart 8 Deluxe at No.5 and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at No.7 (and even within those three the ordering is interesting, given Zelda’s unarguable Game of the Year status, and availability for the entire of the Switch’s lifetime).
Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted: Lost Legacy also appear in Amazon’s Top 10 at No.6 and No.10 respectively. Incredible given that the former was an entirely new franchise and the latter was supposed to have been held back by being part of Uncharted 4’s DLC bundle.
One interesting takeaway from the list is that Switch hardware sold roughly as well as Star Wars Battlefront II. Battlefront II has a fairly even split nationwide between PS4 and Xbox One and both key SKUs of the Switch hardware (grey controllers and red/blue controllers) sit in between the two Battlefront SKUs. Now the Switch costs a lot more cash, but given that one has been pilloried by press and the other exulted, the fact that as many people bought one as the other is still intriguing.
And finally to the SNES Mini, Amazon might have had limited stock, but a placing of No.70 on its listing shows that it didn’t set the charts alight. It was narrowly beaten by the Xbox One X Scorpio Edition at No.67.
