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Even Spider-Man can’t stop football: after taking the top spot in the weekly charts, FIFA 19 also made it to No.1 in the monthly listing despite having only spent two days on shelves when GfK closed its monthly report.
But as we highlighted earlier this week, sales for this new entry in the football franchise were down 25 per cent year-on-year, with the Switch version only taking one per cent of the sales. Now digital shift will obviously account for some of that, but with EA itself only estimating the trend to run at five per cent per annum, there’s still a big gap there. Now it might be that EA has scored a huge success here, converting physical customers into more profitable digital ones, but there was no press release to suggest this was a record-breaking release in order to back such a theory. So maybe, just maybe, the perennial franchise is seeing a little fatigue.
Sony’s Spider-Man had to settle for No.2 for its first month in the charts but is still an incredible success, shifting 44 per cent more copies than Uncharted 4 did on its first month, 94 per cent more than Horizon Zero Dawn and 138 per cent more than God of War.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider completes this entirely new Top Three, with slightly underwhelming sales if you compare it to combined launch sales for Rise of The Tomb Raider on XO and 360 (November 2015) and PS4 (October 2016).
There were two other new entries in the Top Ten in September: NBA 2K19, which sales were down 31 per cent compared to last year’s entry, and PES 2019, which had a 36 per cent drop in sales year-on-year.
Meanwhile, there was a wealth of new entries further down the monthly charts: Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age debuted at No.14, PSVR exclusive Firewall Zero Hour entered the list at No.22, Destiny 2: Forsaken debuted at No.29, Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate made it to No.32, Yakuza Kiwami 2 took No.33, Divinity Original Sin II: Definitive Edition debuted at No.45 and, last but not least, Strange Bridge entered the charts at No.47.
With such a high number of new titles in the charts and Q4 officially started, unit sales are unsurprisingly on the rise, with a 168 per cent increase month-on-month. However sales are down 15 per cent compared to September 2017. In terms of value, the market is down 12 per cent compared to last year but up 295 per cent compared to August.
The PS4 did (again, unsurprisingly) exceptionally well in September, taking a 62.8 per cent market share compared to 40.4 per cent in August.
Here’s the Top Ten for the period between August 26th to September 29th 2018 (data courtesy of Gfk/Ukie):
