The Daily Populous Thursday December 18th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by ign.com and submitted by Darth_Vaper883

November 2025 was a shockingly terrible month for video game sales in the U.S. While we traditionally think of November as a huge sales month what with Black Friday and all, November 2025 was the worst November in video game hardware unit sales, and the worst in physical software dollar sales the U.S. has seen since 1995.

That's according to Circana's monthly report, which paints a pretty dismal picture of last month's commercial performance. The industry in the U.S. saw declines across the board in hardware, accessories, and console spending for an overall drop of 4% year-over-year, at $5.9 billion in total spending.

More specifically, hardware spending was down a whopping 27% year-over-year to $695 million, the lowest hardware spending total for November since 2005's $455 million. Even worse, unit sales reached 1.6 million, which is the lowest November total since 1995's 1.4 million.

And that's representative of declines across the board. Xbox Series hardware sales were down 70% year-over-year. PS5 sales were down over 40%, and combined unit sales of Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 were down over 10% from Switch sales last year, despite this being a launch year for the Nintendo Switch 2.

The Best PS5 Games View 26 Images

What's going on? As pointed out by Circana senior director Mat Piscatella, video game hardware has never been more expensive, reaching an all-time November high of $439 per unit, up 11% year-over-year. The Xbox specifically saw its average price per unit increase by over 30%, perhaps confirming one reason why folks aren't so keen to buy Xboxes specifically.

With the Nintendo Switch 2, Piscatella says he's watching its sales "very closely," and offers this analysis of its current situation:

With six months in the market, it remains the fastest-selling video game hardware in U.S. history. However, part of what was driving that was its availability to be bought during its launch window. It's been extremely rare to have such a successful new device not suffer supply constraints going into its first holiday sales period. Unit sales of Switch 2 were lower than those of Switch 1 during each console's first November, but the price points are also quite different. The average price paid for a new Nintendo Switch in November 2017 was $309 (which, if adjusted for inflation, is approximately $405 in November 2025 dollars), compared to the $486 for Switch 2 in November 2025. Perhaps it is a case of demand having been pulled forward earlier in the year because people could find them. Or perhaps the mass market is not as quickly adopting Switch 2 as it did Switch. Or perhaps consumers are looking elsewhere for holiday gifting as the prices continue to rise in video game hardware. Tough to say at the moment.

There's one piece of hardware that's doing okay, and it's not what you'd expect: the NEX Playground. It was the third best-selling piece of video game hardware of November by unit sales, surpassing the Xbox Series, while the more expensive Xbox Series beat it in dollar sales (the PS5 was first in both categories, the Switch 2 was second). Piscatella calls the NEX Playground a "remarkable story," noting that while everyone else is having a bad time, it just had a superb November by comparison:

November 2025 tracked unit sales at U.S. retailers for NEX Playground were just 7% below its entire tracked lifetime sales at retail through October. With an average selling price of just over $200 in November, strong placement at retail, and some successful influencer and viral marketing efforts, the NEX Playground became one of the hottest video game products of the holiday season during the month. We'll have to see how well the pace can keep up, as there are reports that the NEX Playground is now largely sold out, with secondary market prices on sites like eBay soaring accordingly.

There could be a lesson here that more affordable, family friendly gaming devices carry appeal during holiday gifting season.

Things aren't looking much better on the content side. While Circana reports that content spending was up 1% year-over-year to $4.8 billion, that's with subscription spending rising 16% and 2% growth in mobile. Physical software sales, meanwhile, dropped 14% year-over-year to the worst November since 1995, the year Circana began tracking them.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 put the Call of Duty franchise back on top for another debut month in November as the month's best-seller, marking the 18th year in a row a Call of Duty has launched to the top of the charts. That said, Circana reports that the franchise saw a double-digit percentage full game dollar sales decline when compared to November 2024.

It's a little tricky to make precise comparisons between Black Ops 7 and its predecessor, Black Ops 6, given both games launched into Xbox Game Pass, and Black Ops 6 released in October last year, not November. Still, Piscatella tells me that Black Ops 7's full game dollar sales finished below those of Black Ops 6's last November. Additionally, Black Ops 7 is currently the seventh best-selling game of the year-to-date, and Piscatella anticipates that its rival, Battlefield 6, will end the year as the best-selling game of 2025. This isn't the first time in recent memory it's been beaten, with Hogwarts Legacy coming out on top in 2023. Notably, that year, Hogwarts Legacy beat Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, which did not launch into Game Pass, while Black Ops 7 this year did, almost certainly making its actual dollar sales total lower as a result.

It's worth noting as well that accessories spending was down 13% year-over-year.

This is shaping up to be a pretty weird year. I asked Piscatella what he makes of all this, and what it means for the games industry. He pointed out that much of the story remains to be told in December, and that it's possible consumers are waiting for better deals closer to the holidays. Alternatively, it's possible that economic factors and price of consoles are pushing people to hold off on gaming purchases. Here's what Piscatella had to say:

Retail spending had been holding up relatively well until now, despite the pressure from higher prices we've been seeing in the market. More affluent consumers have kept on spending so far, which has made up for some of the declines in spending from the less affluent portions of the market. Perhaps this is a sign that those higher prices are beginning to impact purchases of pricier items, like consoles. Perhaps not.

However, if the crunch on RAM pricing continues, if we see rising prices on consoles and gaming PCs over the coming months it could, theoretically, be potentially devastating to the dedicated gaming device market. Which would, of course, have potential carryover effects on the content side.

I certainly see some of the relationships between hardware unit sales and pricing we're seeing in the November results as a red flag.

We won't get the December and full-year results in until January, which will tell us a lot more about whether the games industry is about to enter a lean period, or if this November was just a goofy one-off.

November 2025 U.S. Top 20 Best-Selling Games:

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 (NEW) Battlefield 6 NBA 2K26 Madden NFL 26 EA Sports FC 26 Pokemon Legends: Z-A* Ghost of Yotei EA Sports College Football 26 Minecraft* Kirby Air Riders (NEW)* Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment (NEW)* The Outer Worlds 2 Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Donkey Kong Bananza* Marvel's Spider-Man 2 Red Dead Redemption II Grand Theft Auto V Borderlands 4 Forza Horizon 5 Digimon Story: Time Stranger

* Indicates that some or all digital sales are not included in Circana's data. Some publishers, including Nintendo, do not share certain digital data for this report.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

TGB_Skeletor on December 17th, 2025 at 16:14 UTC »

rise of digital games+the quality of AAA games falling down

Dreaminginslowmotion on December 17th, 2025 at 15:47 UTC »

Remember when the gaming skies looked bright mid-COVID? Everyone was getting into Indie games, creating RPGs, creating new VR, and otherwise testing new waters?

This is a man made gaming disaster. Leadership who thought acquiring studios vs creating new content, shoehorning in AI, and moving everything to the cloud was the way to go. Meanwhile users don't want ANY of that.

This could have been avoided.

I worked for one of those game studios acquired up into last year. I know the studio head would have loved nothing more than to have the creative freedom to make more NEW games as in the past (when they were incredibly successful) though like the goose that laid the golden egg) the parent company forced them to continue making the same old IP again and again and again. That's not wisdom, Phil Specter, that's short term gains pre-1983 ET.

WordNERD37 on December 17th, 2025 at 15:41 UTC »

The costs are too high and everyone is hurting on wages. The very unique case where supply & demand, has near no role with this.

We're just poor.