Top and Best-Selling Video Games of 2010

Best-Selling Video Games of 2010

The NPD group, the organization that tracks retails sales of products like video games, released the sales figures for December 2010 yesterday. With that final piece of info, we know now what the biggest games of 2010 were.

The game in the number one slot is no surprise: It's Call of Duty: Black Ops, which sold over 12 million units across all platforms. That's twice as many as the game in the number two position. Want to know what it is? Read on.

NPD no longer provides exact numbers, so other than Black Ops, we don't know the actual number of copies sold for each game. That said, here are the top ten 0f 2010:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard) - Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC, DS - more than 12 million
2. Madden NFL 11 (Electronic Arts) - Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP
3. Halo: Reach (Microsoft) - Xbox 360
4. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Nintendo) – Wii
5. Red Dead Redemption (Take-Two Interactive) - Xbox 360, PS3
6. Wii Fit Plus (Nintendo) – Wii
7. Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft) – Wii
8. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Activision Blizzard) - Xbox 360, PS3, PC
9. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft) - Xbox 360, PS3
10. NBA 2K11 (Take-Two Interactive) - Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, PC

Some thoughts on the results:

It goes without saying that Call of Duty is a juggernaut. Not only does this year's game top the best-seller list, but last year's game is still #8. I don't know of any other series that has such a long tail. The Call of Duty franchise is "The" game of the moment - a title once held my Mario, Grand Theft Auto and Halo. And despite all the hand-wringing over Treyarch's development of CoD games, Black Ops looks like it will be the biggest Call of Duty title yet.

Sports games are still huge. No big surprise there.

Halo, while still a monster, is not the draw that it once was. Obviously it's still a smash, but it wasn't long ago that Halo games were shattering sales records left and right. Now, it's Call of Duty that holds that honor. It'll be interesting to see if the next Halo (the first without Bungie at the helm) tops the sales of Reach.

Nintendo obviously can still move serious amounts of software on the Wii, and so can Ubisoft. Just Dance 2 made the top ten, while Ubi's Micheal Jackson game also made the top 10 for the month of December. So did Disney's Epic Mickey (see those numbers below).

The top ten of December:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard) - Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, DS, PC - over 3.6 million
2. Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft) – Wii
3. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (Activision Blizzard) – PC
4. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft) - Xbox 360, PS3
5. Donkey Kong Country Returns (Nintendo) – Wii
6. Disney Epic Mickey (Disney Interactive Studios) – Wii
7. Madden NFL 11 (Electronic Arts) - Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP
8. Michael Jackson: The Experience (Ubisoft) - Wii, DS, PSP
9. NBA 2K11 (Take-Two Ineractive) - Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PSP, PS2, PC
10. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (Electronic Arts) - Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC