Report: What games did you buy last year?

According to a recently released report, you probably bought sports games, which topped America's list in 2006.

By Eugene Huang

Using independent marketing data and game review averages, Next-Gen has compiled a list of America's 100 top-selling games within the last twelve months. Coming as no surprise to any industry veteran, EA's uber-powerful Madden franchise came in the top spot, with Madden NFL 07 completely destroying the competition by raking in a total of $300 million with 6.5 million copies sold. Coming in a distant second with $85 million in sales and 2.6 million copies sold was Cars, the video game adaptation of Pixar's 2006 movie. Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, with its movie license and simple approachability, grabbed a close third with $95 million in total sales, but only 2.5 million units sold.

The article also breaks down the top 100 by various statistics such as genre (broadly defined), publisher, release date, and platform. For instance, the overwhelming majority of America's best-selling games were divided relatively evenly between two genres: sports games (25%) and games based on previously established media licenses (23%). And who made all those sports games? Why, Electronic Arts, of course. EA held a commanding lead with 22 of their games making the list, and half of those were sports games. Nintendo grabbed second among publishers with 13 titles.

As for release date, most of the top selling games came out in the months leading up to the Christmas holiday season, with 22% being released in November and 17% in October. March came at a close third at 16%, and is representative of the numerous sports games that are released during that time of year.

And lastly, for those wondering how the sales of platform-exclusive games compare to those of cross-platform games, the answer has been made clear: nearly 2/3 of the 100 most popular games were released on multiple platforms. Of the remaining third of platform-exclusive games, nearly half of those were Nintendo DS titles.

Data acquired from such sites as Metacritic.com and GameRankings.com may also provide us with evidence showing that consumers and critics more often than not agree on what makes a good game. 13% of the top 100 games earned less than a 60% average review score. The highest ranking game among those low scorers was Over the Hedge, which earned 27th place with 910,000 copies, despite being reviewed at only 58%. Only three games out of the top 20 received less than a 75% average review score, with Cars leading the way at 2nd place with a mediocre 71%. Interestingly enough, however, only one game out of the top 10 was able to grab an average score above 90%. Gears of War, ranked #6 with 1.8 million units sold, garnered an average 94% rating from most major gaming media outlets.

So what does this data tells us? Well, if you want to create a top-selling game, you have to spend the big bucks to acquire a huge movie or sports license, thin out the talent pool of your development teams in order to distribute it on all major platforms, and cut all corners to make sure that it gets released during the holiday season.

And if every single company followed that same path, what would the industry be like, I wonder?

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