Month: August 2015

It’s impossible to deny the popularity of NetherRealm Studios’ Mortal Kombat X. On top of breathing life into its own sector of the competitive fighting scene, the game brings buckets of blood for the masses who prefer mashing to calculated bouts of footsies; in short, it has a little something for everyone.

A recent report from Fortune gives gamers a more concrete sense of just how popular the game has proven to be in the first half of 2015 with a list of the top-selling video games, courtesy of information direct from The NPD Group, who tracks such things. Mortal Kombat X ranks in at number one.

This chart tracks sales of games in the first six months of the year, regardless of when they released. That means heavy hitters like Minecraft made the list, as did other titles that saw release prior to 2015, including Nintendo’s newest Super Smash Bros. run.

While the list offers an accurate glimpse of retail sales, according to Fortune, it “does not include hard figures for digital sales directly from game platforms like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.” With this in mind, the folks at Chicagoist, in their report, wondered whether or not downloadable content sales were included when figuring out the rankings. This is a good question, and is certainly something that would have affected the outcome of the sales of most titles that made the list, but to what degree?

It’s not that Mortal Kombat X could have transcended the first place slot and found itself in 0th place–that doesn’t exist–but the sales of characters, skin packs, and, hell, even those easy fatality tokens would have likely done a fair amount of work to ensure that title’s dominance. Let’s see if it has enough staying power to last through the rest of the year.

Source: Fortune via Chicagoist