January was a strong month for the game industry with great debuts from critical darlings Kingdom Hearts 3 and Resident Evil 2, but February did not have that sort of luck with reviews on new games. Even with some disappointing reviews though, software sales were up on February from a year ago and it was led by two new games in the top two spots.
The NPD Group released the numbers for the February NPDs via VentureBeat, which revealed that Anthem led the way in February despite less than stellar reception, which was also the case with the number two game Jump Force. Both games had a lot of hype coming out of E3 last year and that hype certainly translated to sales. In fact, Jump Force had the third best debut month for a Bandai Namco game ever.
Coming in third for the month of February was Kingdom Hearts 3, only slipping two spots and retaining the current number spot for the year as a whole. Anthem and Jump Force now follow Kingdom Hearts 3 for the first two months at two and three respectively, so definitely a solid debut for both games.
New release Far Cry New Dawn came in at number four, which is definitely a lot lower than Far Cry 5 debuted at last year. Metro: Exodus also debuted much lower down the list at #8, but it was a new franchise high for debut month, beating the opening month sales of Metro: Last Light by nearly 50%.
While it did not have any games in the very top five for the month of February, the Nintendo Switch was the highest selling console of the month of February. Making this even more impressive is that they generated the highest hardware sales for Nintendo since February 2011, which is rather impressive.
It will certainly be interesting to see how Anthem hangs on in the March NPDs considering all the issues it has suffered since launch, as that could really show us how many people are still willing to give the game a chance moving forward.
