The short version
- Circana (formerly NPD) publishes the main monthly chart of US video game sales.
- It ranks games by dollar sales, not copies, and counts physical plus full-game digital.
- Some publishers don't share digital sales, so parts of the chart are projections.
- A console can lose units but hold its dollars when prices go up, and the September chart shows exactly that.
Who makes the chart
Circana is a US market research firm. It began life as NPD, which started tracking the North American games market in 1995, and took the Circana name in 2023 after merging with IRI. It tracks far more than games, from groceries to toys, which is why its game numbers are treated as an industry standard.
When you see a headline like "Wolverine was September's best-seller", it almost always means Circana's US chart. Circana's games analyst Mat Piscatella posts the highlights each month on social media. Our September breakdown is a good example.
Where the numbers come from
Image: Zerocade
Circana builds the chart from several sources:
- Retail point-of-sale data from participating US shops, for boxed games, hardware and accessories.
- Digital sales data that publishers and platforms agree to share. This covers full-game downloads, not in-game purchases.
- Consumer panels and surveys, which help estimate what the tracked data misses.
The mix matters because most games are now bought digitally. A chart built only on physical sales, as charts were twenty years ago, would badly misjudge today's market.
Dollars, not copies
Image: Zerocade
The game chart is ranked by money spent. A $70 game that sells 100,000 copies beats a $30 game that sells 200,000. That favours full-priced new releases and deluxe editions over budget games, and it explains why a cheaper indie hit can sell more copies than a chart-topper and still sit lower.
Hardware gets reported both ways, and the gap between the two can tell a story. In September, Xbox Series units fell 27% but dollars fell only 2%, because the average console sold for $663, up a third on a year earlier. Fewer people bought one, and each of them paid more. That's the same squeeze behind our consoles sold at a loss explainer.
The digital gap
Circana relies on publishers to share digital sales. Many do, but not all. Recent reports say Xbox and EA have stopped sharing. Nintendo has a long history of not sharing its own first-party digital numbers.
When a publisher doesn't share, Circana projects that game's digital sales. Coverage of the chart often marks this: one symbol for actual digital data and another for projected. A game ranked on projections could really sit a place or two higher or lower.
This is also why Nintendo games often look weaker on US charts than in Nintendo's own results. If only the boxed copies are counted, a big digital seller loses ground.
Sell-through vs sell-in
Circana measures sell-through, meaning what customers actually bought. That's different from sell-in or "shipped" figures, which companies sometimes announce. Those count units sent to shops, whether or not anyone bought them yet.
So when a company's "shipped" number doesn't match the chart, both can be correct. A console maker might ship two million units to stores before the holidays while Circana records only the ones that reached customers.
How to read a chart headline
A few habits help:
- Check the measure. "Best-selling" on Circana means dollars, not copies.
- Check the period. Monthly charts cover a "retail month" of four or five weeks, so a launch on the last day of a month can look weak.
- Check for projections. If the game's publisher doesn't share digital data, the rank is partly an estimate.
- Year to date beats a single month. One month is noisy; the yearly chart shows real staying power.
What this means for India
Circana's chart is US only. India has no widely published monthly equivalent, so a game topping the US chart tells you about American buyers, not Indian ones. The closest signals here are Steam's top-seller lists, PlayStation Store charts and retailer best-seller pages, none of which publish full numbers. Treat Circana as a strong signal of what's popular in the West, not a global ranking.
