Sam Fisher used little stealth in his slaying of the competition in April, with Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction clearly visible at the top of April's bestselling games list, according to the NPD Group.
Ubisoft's Xbox 360 exclusive Splinter Cell beat out the latest Pokemon games for the Nintendo DS and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The first PlayStation 3 game on the list is God of War III, which sold another 180,300 copies in the United States last month. Kratos was joined by another PS3 game, Super Street Fighter IV, which managed to move more than 143,000 copies on the platform, compared to just under 108,000 copies on the Xbox 360.
Perennial Wii favorites like Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus and Just Dance also repped Nintendo in the top ten, with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 still going strong. The full list of April bestsellers, according to NPD are after this.
01. Splinter Cell: Conviction (Xbox 360) - 486,100
02. Pokemon SoulSilver (DS) - 242,900
03. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) - 200,300
04. Pokemon HeartGold (DS) - 192,600
05. God of War III (PS3) - 180,300
06. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) - 179,000
07. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (Xbox 360) - 166,000
08. Wii Fit Plus (Wii) - ???
09. Just Dance (Wii) - 144,000
10. Super Street Fighter IV (PS3) - 143,000
U.S. consumers dropped a cool $398.5 million USD on video game software last month, down a whopping 22% from the April of 2009. As of May 1, a total of $2.52 billion USD has been spent on games, down from last year as well.
(Note: NPD is no longer providing public sales figures for the entire top ten, unfortunately. That's why you get question marks instead. Update: Additional figures added from Nintendo.)
"A big contributor to the decline in software sales comes from the March '10 new releases, which fell off more dramatically than did last year's March releases," explains NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier. "In aggregate, March '09 new releases dropped off by 54% in April '09 sales, while this year, new releases in March '10 dropped off by 75% in April."
Cheer up, U.S. video game industry. There's always May!