August spending drops 7% to $4.1bn despite Madden and mobile success | US Monthly Charts

Circana has released the market figures for US games spending in August, which showed an overall decline in dollars spent – down 7% year-on-year to $4.1 billion.

The biggest drop was seen in hardware sales, down 36% compared to August 2023 to $208 million. Switch saw the sharpest drop off, with sales down 41%. PlayStation 5 remains the biggest selling console for the month.

Video game content – encompassing full game sales (both physical and digital), as well as microtransactions, DLC, and subscriptions across console, mobile, PC and VR – fell 5% to $3.7 billion. However, Sensor Tower told Circana mobile content spending was actually up 5% year-on-year.

Madden NFL 25 was the best-selling game of August, making this the 25th year in a row where Madden has been the biggest seller in its opening month.

Last month’s No.1, EA Sports College Football 25 settled for second place but has become the biggest selling game of the year to date, surpassing Helldivers 2. And that’s without the copies found in the EA Sports MVP Bundle (which includes the deluxe editions of both College Football and Madden) – this product stands as the fifth biggest seller of the year, and fourth biggest in August.

Three other new entires made it into the Top 20 for August, including Ubisoft’s Star Wars: Outlaws at No.3, Square Enix’s Visions of Mana at No.10 and Bandai Namco’s Gundam Breaker 4 at No.11.

Year-to-date games spending in the US remains relatively stable, up 1% to $36.3 billion for the first eight months of the year.

Video game content spending is up 4% to $32.3 billion, but hardware is down 28% to $2.3 billion.

Here are the top 20 selling games from the period of August 4 to 31, data courtesy of Circana:

*Digital sales not included, ^Xbox and Switch digital sales not included, ^^Digital sales on Nintendo platforms not included.