Naughty Dog's PlayStation 3 exclusive Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, as expected, trounced the competition in October moving over a half-million copies, according to the NPD Group. But competitors Wii Fit Plus and Borderlands racked up impressive sales of their own.
The month was packed with new software, including Forza Motorsport 3, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and NBA 2K10 which put big numbers on the board. And while the PS3 and Wii secured software spots one and two, respectively, the Xbox 360's showing as a platform resulted in six of the top ten games sold in the U.S. this October. That's a lot of royalty payments going Microsoft's way.
And speaking of Microsoft's fortunes, last month's U.S. software champ Halo 3 ODST managed to round up another 271,000 sales.
The top ten games for the month of October according to NPD are...
01. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3) - 537,000
02. Wii Fit Plus (Wii) - 441,000
03. Borderlands (Xbox 360) - 418,000
04. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) - 314,000
05. NBA 2K10 (Xbox 360) - 311,000
06. Halo 3 ODST (Xbox 360) - 271,000
07. NBA 2K10 (PS3) - 213,000
08. Forza Motorsport 3 (Xbox 360) - 175,000
09. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (DS) - 169,000
10. FIFA Soccer 10 (Xbox 360) - 156,000
That's just a portion of the $572.73 million that U.S. consumers spent on video game software last month, down 18% from the same period last year.
NPD's Anita Frazier notes that about half of Wii Fit Plus' sales for the month were of the bundled variety, meaning that plenty of Wii owners are investing in Wii Balance Boards for the first time.
"The top game for the month across all platforms was NBA 2K10, at 575K units," Frazier says of 2K Sports' latest. "It was a great launch for the game, outselling last year's NBA 2K9 by 60% in its launch month. Sales on both the Xbox 360 and PS3 platforms improved substantially over last year."
Now for the bad news.
"The music/dance genre saw big declines this month compared to last year," Frazier notes. "The genre generated $53 million in sales as compared to $137 million last year. Both Rock Band: Beatles, and Guitar Hero 5 have the potential to be good gifting items for the holidays, so we should expect to see an uptick in sales over the next two months."