IGN editor-in-chief Cam Shea takes a look at the video games sales charts for the week ending July 9, 2018.
A year after its PS4 release, Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy – the remaster of Crash Bandicoot’s first three adventures – has made the transition to Nintendo Switch, PC and Xbox One and it’s clear that gamers of all stripes have just as much love for the marsupial as the PlayStation faithful. This is the game’s second week in the number one spot.
Hot on his heels are three more relatively new releases. Jurassic World Evolution, which offers the chance to run a dinosaur-filled theme park, slots in at number two. The game received a mixed critical response, but still succeeds in scratching an itch that Jurassic Park fans have had for years. The Crew 2, meanwhile, which lets players race cars, planes and boats across a massive re-creation of the continental United States, drops a place this week to number three, while LEGO Incredibles comes in at number four, proving that there’s life left yet in the very long-running LEGO gaming formula.
The rest of the chart illustrates the incredible mainstream staying power of gaming’s biggest names: GTA, FIFA and Call of Duty in particular. As we noted alongside the last post, however, one important factor to consider is that this chart only indicates what’s going on in retail and doesn’t factor in digital sales. Platforms like Steam and Nintendo’s eShop are a huge part of the ecosystem, selling a wide array of titles both big budget and independently produced. And then there are free-to-play games, like Fortnite – which recently launched its fifth season and is currently the biggest game on IGN (and in the world) – which are monetised in entirely different ways, so will never appear on a sales chart.
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