And apparently there’s still people who don’t own Smash Ultimate yet
Fighting games can still probably be considered a somewhat niche genre in the grand scheme of the industry, but that niche seems to be ever growing with how many more titles that are now consistently topping sales charts.
The NPD Group recently released their September 2022 sales data, which revealed JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle R was among the best-selling games in the United States last month while MultiVersus completely fell off of the rankings.
The JoJo fighting game managed to finish the month in the top 10 overall at number 8, beating out Elden Ring, which is pretty impressive given the slew of other big gaming releases during September like FIFA 23, Splatoon 3 and The Last of Us: Part 1.
For the individual consoles, All Star Battle R charted highly among them all too reaching number 6 on Xbox, 9th on PlayStation and 10th on Nintendo Switch.
US NPD PREMIUM GAMES – September 2022 Top 20 Sellers pic.twitter.com/iO0qzJdT41
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) October 21, 2022
Even though the JoJo franchise is probably more popular in the West now than ever before, these results are still pretty surprising considering All Star Battle R is an enhanced re-release of a game that came out almost a decade ago.
It also certainly shows that a fighting game can sell well without rollback netcode in 2022, but we don’t really see All Star Battle being a sustained hit beyond launch.
Without strong online and a lack of wider community push, JJBA:ASBR will likely end up going down the same route as the original release where fans enjoy the fan service for a short while and move on.
Hopefully, these initial strong sales numbers will push Bandai Namco to make a brand new JoJo fighting game in the future to fully capitalize on this global popularity.
As for who isn’t there, MultiVersus failed to chart at all for the month of September, which is a pretty big drop off from its first 2 months — although not inherently bad news in itself.
The new Warner Bros. platform fighter launched as the top game in the US back in July before dropping down to 5th in August.
US NPD PREMIUM GAMES – August 2022 Top 20 Sellers pic.twitter.com/0vnu2fiONS
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) September 20, 2022
This was also an impressive feat for the title because the NPD tracks their ranks in terms of dollar sales, so it wasn’t just based on MVS being a free-to-play game
When looking at August’s NPD sales, however, it becomes pretty clear why MultiVersus didn’t make it up there 3 months in a row.
The NPD group apparently only counts sales of MultiVersus through its Founder’s Pack Edition purchases only, so any money spent within the game itself does not get counted towards its performance.
Everything is probably still very fine for the game considering it broke multiple records upon release. We just won’t know how well it is doing without WB telling us.
What’s perhaps even more impressive than both JoJo and MultiVersus, however, is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s continued sales success, and the game is almost 4 years old now.
Plus, Sora came out as the final character over a year ago already.
US NPD PREMIUM GAMES – YTD 2022 Top 20 Sellers pic.twitter.com/DafHXhUWYK
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) October 21, 2022
Smash Ultimate was still the 4th best-selling Switch title in September and is 17th for the entire year in terms of dollars made for Nintendo.
So don’t expect that 28.8 million copies to stop growing any time soon.
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