It’s one thing to hear people in the international community exclaim that Americans are loud slobs who don’t care about anything except violence and football. It’s another to see it spelled out in raw numbers. Brian Caulfield of Forbes, using data provided by the NPD Group, wrote an article early last week looking at the ten best selling videogames in the US as of April 2008. Here are the results:
1) Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas 9.4 Million Units Sold
2) Guitar Hero 3 8.2M
3) Madden NFL 2007 7.7M
4) Grand Theft Auto: Vice City 7.3M
5) Madden NFL 2006 7.7M
6) Halo 2 6.61M
7) Madden NFL 2008 6.6M
8) Call of Duty 4 6.25M
9) Grand Theft Auto 3 6.2M
10) Madden NFL 2005 6.1M
Yep. Guns and football from here until Sunday. What’s most shocking about this list is the complete absence of even the most recent Pokemon titles, a series that continues to sell millions of copies within weeks of a new edition’s release.
Depressing as this list is, Caulfield makes one excellent point.
So are there any exceptions to the pattern of gore and gridiron? Yes. Guitar Hero III, the second-best-selling game on the list, breaks the pattern. The game pairs players with an enormous, guitar-shaped controller and has them try to keep up with onscreen cues in an effort to recreate monstrously complex guitar riffs. In fact, if you factor in the high price of the game--$99 for the Sony PlayStation 3 edition, largely because you're also buying a big fake guitar controller--the game generated more sales than any others.
That's right, sweet rock 'n' roll is the only thing in America that can outsell football and violence. Maybe there's still hope for us yet.
Man, I hope he’s right.
Thanks to NeoGAF user sonycowboy for the link.