Today NPD Analyst Mat Piscatella released a new blog post making his prediction for the US market in the holiday season 2018, and for the whole year.
According to Piscatella, it’ll be a very tight race for games, but Red Dead Redemption 2 will be the best-selling game (in dollar sales) of both the fourth quarter and the full year, beating Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Battlefield V, NBA 2K19 and Far Cry 5 will complete the top-5.
Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!, Pokemon: Let’s Go, Eevee! and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate‘s launches are also predicted to push the Nintendo Switch to the top-selling (in units) place for consoles for both the Holidays quarter and the full year.
Piscatella also predicts that the installed base of PS4 and Xbox One will exceed that of the PS2 and original Xbox in comparable time frame by 6%, and that of the PS3 and Xbox 360 by 30%.
PS4, Xbox One, and Switch should all sell at least four million units in 2018 in the United States. Total sales of the three consoles combined should be over 17.5 million units, which is the highest total achieved in the local market since 2012.
Physical game sales should grow by at least 8% year-on-year. Digital download for full games are expected to grow by a double-digit rate.
If you’re curious to see more NPD statistics, you can check out the latest release, related to the month of May.