New information is coming out regarding The NPD Group’s April report on games for the United States. One of the biggest things to come out of the report is that the Nintendo Switch has now broken a record which the Nintendo Wii had held for over a decade. That record is the year-to-date dollar sales for a period ending in April, though exact numbers were not provided.
For those who are not familiar with what that may mean, it means that sales of Nintendo Switch, strictly as it pertains to monetary value rather than units sold, from January 1, 2020 to April 30, 2020, were higher than the previous record. That record was previously held by the Wii and took place over the period of January 1, 2009 to April 30, 2009. This makes the Nintendo Switch the console which has sold for the most total money in the first four months of any given year in U.S. history.
Based on some of the other information to come out of the NPD report, it is not all that surprising that the record has been broken. March and April of 2020 have been an unprecedented period of time and their impacts are varied and unpredictable in the long term. In the short term, however, there was a 163% growth in hardware sales in April 2020 compared to April 2019. Nintendo Switch was the bestselling hardware platform in April in terms of both dollar sales and units sold.
It was not just hardware that saw increased sales in April, though, as accessories, pre-paid cards, controllers, and games all saw increases of as much as 49% as well. Headsets/headphone spending, in particular, broke another record with the Xbox One Ear Force Recon 70 Gaming Headset Black doubling the previous record set in April of 2018. In terms of the controllers, the traditional black DualShock 4 was the top seller of April, but the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller is currently the top seller for the year.
All these records and massive increases combine to increase overall spending on the video game market to $4.5 billion year-to-date which constitutes a 12% increase from last year. In April alone, spending was up 73% overall compared to last year. The $1.5 billion spent on gaming in April of 2020 also breaks another record, this time for spending in the month of April. The previous record had been April 2008 which had generated $1.2 billion.
There are even more records that were broken in April, but suffice it to say that April 2020 has been a record-shattering month for gaming.
