July's NPD chart sees Octopath Traveler take the top spot

It walked the octopath to success

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Hype for Square Enix’s retro-RPG revival Octopath Traveler was through the roof before release last month. Not only did the game look to perfectly capture the SNES era of RPGs, it was one that Square Enix was using as a testing ground for similar projects in the future. If July’s NPD Group sales chart is anything to go by, we’ll likely be seeing a lot more classic RPGs in the future.

In the month of July 2018, Octopath Traveler took the top spot alongside Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V and helped push game sales up 17% over the same period last year. NPD analyst Mat Piscatella said, “Year-to-date spending across video game hardware, software, accessories, and game cards is up 17 percent when compared to the same period a year ago…Growth has occurred across all categories of spending, with accessories and game cards driving the largest dollar growth.”

Just as he said, even hardware sales are up from a year ago. This is likely to do with a larger library of titles finally being available for newcomers to adopt, though it could also be down to how ridiculously popular the Switch has been. Nintendo is not only dominating the summer of 2018 but the entire year. As Piscatella points out, “Nintendo is the top-selling full game software publisher for both July and year to date. Nintendo Switch is the only platform showing year-on-year growth in full-game dollar sales with gains of nearly 70 percent when compared to a year ago.”

Here is the full chart for July: