Shadow of War tops the US October charts

The US October charts from NPD Group told the tale of a hard-fought battle for video game supremacy. So hard-fought in fact that several companies would like to call themselves victors.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War was officially the best-selling game of October as the sales were tallied up, followed by Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Origins with Super Mario Odyssey in third. However, Nintendo claimed in a press release that the "Super Mario Odyssey game for Nintendo Switch emerged as the top-selling video game of the month on the NPD sales chart". Nintendo typically spins these things in their favour so we're left guessing that they've separated the SKUs (Shadow of War and Assassin's Creed Origins released on PC, PS4, and Xbox One) and/or that they added their own digital sales number (that aren't included in NPD Group's analysis).

It was a great month for hardware sales too as this marked the October since 2011 where more than one million consoles were sold. Albeit largely thanks to the cheap SNES Mini. Nintendo Switch topped hardware sales and Nintendo combined for two thirds of the hardware sales during October. Overall, sales were down 11% year-on-year as software declined a whopping 20% as Shadow of War, Assassin's Creed Origins and Super Mario Odyssey failed to live up to last year's October releases (Battlefield 1, Mafia III, Gears of War 4).

1. Middle-earth: Shadow of War / Warner Bros. (new)
2. Assassin's Creed: Origins / Ubisoft (new)
3. Super Mario Odyssey
4. South Park: The Fractured But Whole
5. NBA 2K18
6. FIFA 18
7. WWE 2K18
8. Madden NFL 18
9. Destiny 2
10. Forza Motorsport 7