Battlefield: Hardline trumps Bloodborne in March US retail sales

Mario Party 10 comes in fourth.

News by Jeffrey Matulef Contributor

Updated on April 17, 2015

Battlefield: Hardline was the best-selling game in US retail for the month of March, according to analyst group NPD.

Bloodborne came in second. Then again, Bloodborne also came out near the end of the month on 24th March, while Battlefield: Hardline was released a week earlier on the 17th. Hardline's also available on multiple consoles, whereas Bloodborne is exclusive to the PS4.

While Bloodborne did quite well, it didn't manage to set a record for PS4-exclusive titles, an honour still held by inFamous: Second Son. "The launch of Bloodborne ranked as second overall in software sales this month, but also has the second highest sales for the debut month of a first-party game on the PS4, after inFamous: Second Son, in March 2014," noted NPD Group's Liam Callahan.

Another console exclusive that ranked very high on the list, at number four, was Mario Party 10 on Wii U, which debuted on 20th March. Given that it came out two-thirds of the way through the month, received middling critical reception, and the Wii U has a fairly small install base, coming in fourth (right after GTA 5) is pretty impressive.

Overall, console sales have decreased 29 per cent year-over-year, but that's possibly because a lot of folks have already upgraded to the current generation of consoles, an observation made by the fact that current generation (PS4, Xbox One, Wii U) software sales are up 58 per cent over March of last year. "This is a sign of the health of the eight generation console space; especially when considering the strong March 2014 software releases (as a comparison) such as Titanfall and inFamous: Second Son," Callahan noted.

That being said, those heavy hitters from March 2014 performed better than this March's best sellers, but the current market has a much more expansive library of games from before March that are continuing to do the business. "One factor in the decline of total new physical sales in March 2015 was the 16 percent decrease of new releases sales compared to games launched in March 2014," Callahan observed.

The top 10 retail games in the US for March 2015 are as follows: