PlayStation 4 Sweeps June Game Sales, While Mario Kart 8 Resuscitates the Wii U

You could argue that now we know why Microsoft sent out that bolt-from-the-blue Xbox One sales claim half a day before NPD’s June sales figures arrived: it turns out Sony’s PlayStation 4 was the top selling console for June 2014, while Nintendo’s Wii U snatched the top selling single game SKU with Mario Kart 8.

Let’s start with overall industry sales, which saw something of a spring banquet when May 2014 came along and year-on-year retail hardware, software and accessories sales soared by 52 percent.

June 2014 saw further year-on-year growth across retail hardware, software and accessories categories by 24 percent over June 2013. Once again, the key factor was hardware sales growth of 106 percent (in May, by comparison, hardware growth was 95 percent year-on-year), offsetting declines in portable hardware sales.

As usual, we don’t have unit sales specifics, but Sony claimed victory for next-gen software sales in an email, writing that the PS4 “[led] two of the top three titles” (Watch Dogs, FIFA 14) and was first in unit sales “for the sixth consecutive month.”

Nintendo, for its part, claimed Mario Kart 8 (reviewed here) was June’s top-selling game and gave us a few rare figures: 470,000 physical and digital units sold in June, bring the total to more than 885,000 units sold (in the U.S. alone) in the game’s first five weeks. Nintendo says June 2014 Wii U sales are up 233 percent over June 2013, while Wii U software sales are up 373 percent for the same period.

I’d list NPD’s physical software sales, but at this point it’s getting too confusing: Watch Dogs was the top-seller (over Mario Kart 8) across all platforms if you ignore digital sales, but as noted above, Nintendo says Mario Kart 8 was the top-selling game once you factor in digital sales. (If I were NPD, I’d either figure out how to fold accurate digital sales into the rankings, or stop publishing the physical software sales chart entirely.)

While NPD says portable sales declined year-on-year, Nintendo notes that June 2014 3DS sales were up over the prior month by more than 55 percent, driven in part by sales of Tomodachi Life (175,000 digital and physical copies sold).

We’re now well into an extended up-trend, too: NPD says nine of the last 10 months saw year-on-year growth, thanks primarily to the new console launches last November, but NPD notes that growth trend started with software sales in September and October 2013 (in other words, Grand Theft Auto V — still listing in NPD’s top 10 chart for June 2014 software sales, incidentally).

What’s next: July 2014’s going to look pretty sleepy, sales-wise, and we’ll probably see declines across the board, though the Destiny beta that kicked off on PS4 and PS3 yesterday, adding Xbox One and Xbox 360 next week, could bolster hardware sales. The Last of Us for PS4 should do reasonably well, but it doesn’t launch until July 29. August is pretty quiet until Diablo 3 (for PS4 and Xbox One) comes along on August 19, followed by the latest Madden NFL on August 26.

But it’s September everyone’s waiting for: Assuming Destiny and The Sims 4 don’t suck, those two alone could well set sales records.