The new generation of fighting games have been finding quite a bit of success in terms of raw numbers, which is nice to see across multiple very different titles.
Circana / the NPD Group just released their latest video game sales data report where Tekken 8, MultiVersus, Mortal Kombat 1 and even Super Smash Bros. Ultimate all managed to make different charts.
These latest numbers come from the month of May 2024, so they’ve fallen a bit behind lately in terms of processing though it’s still interesting to see how these fighters are faring in the wider gaming landscape.
After falling down to 17th place in April, Tekken 8 dropped completely out of the overall top 20 chart of sales in the United States for the first time since launching in January.
This ends 3D fighting game from Bandai Namco’s streak on the main NPD chart at four months, which is still ahead of Street Fighter 6’s three months of rankings.
May 2024 Top 20 Best-Selling Premium Games – U.S. (Dollar Sales, Physical and Digital from digital data sharing publishers, excludes add-on content) pic.twitter.com/V751fMRtbl
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) July 8, 2024
Tekken didn’t disappear completely, however, because it managed to hold down its spot on the year-to-date ranks.
For the entire year of 2024, Tekken 8’s managed to hold on to the number 6 spot for the past three months. In fact, nothing really changed from April until you get down to 13th place.
So the game is still sitting pretty well over here though we haven’t had an official update on sales since Tekken reached 2 million copies a month after launching.
Moving on to NetherRealm Studios, their fighter did something a bit more rare.
Mortal Kombat 1 had fallen out of the NPD top 20 list for the first time since its September 2023 release in April, but the game clawed its way back for May reaching 19th again with the chart showing it was 21st the previous month.
Year-to-Date Ending May 2024 Top 20 Best-Selling Premium Games – U.S. (Dollar Sales, Physical and Digital from digital data sharing publishers, excludes add-on content) pic.twitter.com/Wnacwg4ixw
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) July 8, 2024
Despite that, though, MK1 is still not on the top sales chart for 2024, which is a bit surprising.
Mortal Kombat was also able to hit the top 10 of Xbox sales after being 16th in April.
And that wasn’t the only Warner Bros. fighter to show up in these rankings either.
MultiVersus may have just launched officially on May 28, but those three days were enough to make the platform fighter hit the top 10 of the most montnly users on PlayStation.
The previous month it was at 121st since the beta severs were still offline, so that was definitely the largest jump on these lists.
May 2024 Top 10 Titles Played on PlayStation 5 Ranked by U.S. Monthly Active Users (Source: Circana Player Engagement Tracker) pic.twitter.com/4Wed2LDUdZ
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) July 8, 2024
With just those short few days after launch, it’ll be more interesting to see if MultiVersus can reach the actual sales chart for June (since it counts money made, not copies sold) like it did in the open beta and retain those player numbers.
Finally, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate continues to chart at 7th for the Nintendo Switch because apparently not everyone has a copy yet.
Even though the massive platform fighter came out at the end of 2018, Smash stayed consistently on the overall NPD charts for years and almost never missed a Nintendo ranking in the past five and a half years, which is pretty crazy.
May 2024 Top 10 Best-Selling Premium Games on Nintendo Platforms – U.S. (Dollar Sales, Physical and Digital from digital data sharing publishers, excludes add-on content) pic.twitter.com/wYTbGGaFh7
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) July 8, 2024
According to their official data, Smash Ultimate has pushed an astonishing 34.22 million copies copies as of March 31, so it’s probably going to be holding that crown of best-selling premium fighter for a very long time.
Capcom recently updated Street Fighter 6’s numbers to 3.3 million copies as of the end of the last quarter while we haven’t heard about MK1’s sales since it reached 3 million after around a month on the market.
With deep discounts going on like the Steam Summer Sale and others, we’re quite intrigued to see how these major fighters perform in June and July though we’ll have to wait for those rankings or official updates from the developers.