June NPD: Duke Nukem Forever is #2

by JC Fletcher on Jul 14th 2011 6:30PM

Yes, it's true. A startling (and vaguely insulting) number of American consumers ignored our review and purchased Duke Nukem Forever, rocketing it to the #2 position on the NPD sales charts for the month of June. Perhaps they just didn't want to ask for refunds on those 14-year-old pre-orders. The Duke occupies a position on the charts just under its equally retro (in a different way) Take-Two contemporary, L.A. Noire.

Also notable on the sales charts is the debut of another time-lost title, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. At #5, it is the first 3DS exclusive to chart in the NPD top ten. Find the top ten best-selling games listed after the break.

It's definitely a triumphant month for the past, as total game sales were down from $1.15 billion in June of 2010 to $1.03 billion in June of this year. Once again, however, Microsoft is happy, declaring its Xbox 360 the only console in the US to show year-over-year growth. The Xbox was the top-selling console with 507,000 units which Microsoft claims is "nearly twice as many units as other current-generation platforms" this month.

Top 10 best-selling games (US) for June 2011

L.A. Noire (360, PS3)
Duke Nukem Forever (360, PS3, PC)
Infamous 2 (PS3)
Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game (Wii, 360, NDS, PS3, 3DS, PSP, PC)
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS)
Call of Duty: Black Ops (360, PS3, Wii, NDS, PC)
NBA 2K11 (360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP, PC)
Mortal Kombat (PS3, 360)
Cars 2 (NDS, Wii, 360, PS3, PC)
Just Dance 2 (Wii)

Tags: 3ds, ds, duke-nukem-forever, la-noire, microsoft, nintendo, npd, npd-monthly, pc, playstation, ps3, sales, the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time, the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time-3d, wii, xbox

Reader Comments (86)

I haven't bought DNF yet, but I probably will someday. Despite some pretty scathing reviews, the game is still sort of a legend.

@ItsameMatt03
So was Too Human, does that mean you're going to waste your money/time playing that game?

@mywhitenoise I couldn't be happier with the time and money I spent on Too Human. Despite its flaws, it's still one of my favourite games on 360.

@mywhitenoise

I bought Too Human on the first day(preordered), and yes it was very flawed, but I looked through all the little niggles and found a pretty decent game. Looking back, I'm glad I spent my money on Too Human.

@ItsameMatt03

Maybe now joystick can see that their review basically sucks, i have seen a lot of games that they call bad and are not as bad as they said, Ironically must of the games that they call bad end up being very funny. With duke, I´m playing it and i really like it, yes it´s not an awesome game that shows more than 14 years in development, but must people don´t see that the game that we are playing was more a fast development that gearbox did for a fast buck and for getting the character than anything else. Those guys can create awesome games just look at borderlands. I´m sure the next duke game is going to be awesome.....but they are going to invest the right amount of time on that one, let´s just hope is not another 14 years......

@mywhitenoise Too Human didn't sell badly either and I thought it was a pretty good game myself. I sometimes wonder about game reviewers.

@mywhitenoise

I like DNF and Too Human.

Come at me!

@KungFuChaosNinja

I HATE DNF. I ignored reviews thinking it was just some uppity reviewers who weren't into the humor. I was initially into the nostalgia of it but it wore off, I became indifferent, then I realized I hated it when it got to the alien rape. F*** this game. I am still going to finish it because I paid $60 for the piece of sh**. The game is ugly. The level design is terrible. How many times do I need to fall into some pit around a dark corner? The loading times is crazy after every death. I just changed the brightness one time and it took 45 seconds to reload. The humor isn't even funny after the first level. F**K THIS GAME. DO NOT BUY!

@Aguiluz -- Speaking of those PS1 games, I had a blast playing Time to Kill. Now that was a very interesting third-person Duke Nukem game. I'm going to probably pick it up again at some point.

@mywhitenoise
Only it wasn't.

@Hunter141072

I don't get why people assign Gearbox with all the credit. Or the blame if they are negative.

3D Realms did 90% of the work on the game. When Gearbox Studios took it over, they finished it up, not completely redid it from scratch. All of the assets, including source code, and partially completed game, were handed over.

It's like having a Football player play almost the entire game, then in the last few minutes of the last quarter, you bench him, and send someone else in, and then giving all credit for the entire game to that one player.

@Hunter141072

And so all of the anti-popular opinion morons come out. "Ohh this game is hated so I must say everyone is stupid to be edgy and go against popular opinion!!!". The game was objectively, and severely, flawed. To give the game anything above a subpar score would undermine Joystiq's integrity. Enjoy the game all you want, but realize you're enjoying a piece of s***. But that's okay, because some people are into s***.

Hey video game consumers: What are you doing?!

@BizarroPunisher

Buying things they like.

@BizarroPunisher

June NPD -
X360 507k,
PS3 276k~
Wii 273k,

DS 386k,
3DS 143k

Nice showing for InFamous 2.

Surprised to see Duke there, though, but.. maybe I shouldn't be!

@Ezio Auditore da Firenze
Are you gonna kill yourself if SONY getds out of the gaming industry?

@DesmondMiles

Hmm.

That's a good question. I think I'd just give up gaming and start reading more books. =P

@DesmondMiles

Are you going to kill yourself it that doesn't happen?

@BigEgo007

Don't get my hopes up!

@Ezio Auditore da Firenze
You'd really stop playing games if one company stopped putting out a console? Sheesh man.

@ToTheMoon

Are you just downvoting Ezio's comments out of reflex or something?

@Ezio Auditore da Firenze

What's with all the Ezio hate?

Or perhaps your review was maybe, oh I dunno..... wrong?

@Reaper man
sales are not an indication of a good product.

See Twilight, Tyler Perry, Lady Gaga, and Wii

@Reaper man
Yeah well, that's like... your opinion, man.

The dude abides.

@Reaper man No, it was dead on. I rented it from RedBox one night. It starts off ok.. Cheesed out to the max, but man that 90's humor gets old VERY quickly.

But even if you can get through the 6th grade humor, it doesn't stop the fact that the game was a horrid ugly mess that would've been "ok" for a mid life XBOX1 game, and played about as smooth as the N64 port 12 years ago. The level design was disgusting, and the weapons were the most boring assortment I've seen in a while

Game went back halfway through before it was even due.

I loved DNF.... Everyone bashed it saying it was shit,

but it was nostalgia, and a sequel to DN3D, if you were expecting the best graphics and updated anything, you don't know duke very well.

@Dreda I expected humor.

@Dreda It would have been a lot more bearable if it weren't for the hideous load times. (And the humorless "jokes".) Frankly both of those were awful even by 1997 standards.

Duke won't accept "Number 2".

@Shadowbender

Wrong!

Duke would accept number 2 if it was a choice for him if he wanted one or two girls.

Hail to the king, baby

@Shadowbender

But there sure is a lot of #2 humour...

@Shadowbender

Sure he will. He just picks it up out of the toilet and throws it on the walls.

@Stevetrop Man of Mystery

Have you seen the CGI "girls" in DNF? Nobody would want to have sex with that.

Well, I bought Duke from the Steam sale for 25 bucks. You might think I'm crazy, but so far I'm actually enjoying it more than LA Noire - which I bought for $60 the day it came out.

I will say that for a game like DNF, it didn't matter what anyone was going to say, people were going to play it. It was just one of those games... However, I expect to see a huge drop in sales next month though.

Personally I'm more annoyed about the success of CoD:black ops. But, if everyone listened to the critics, there'd probably only be about a couple dozen games series spanning all the consoles and pc because "they were too ....something."

@30yearGamer
What do you mean the success? There used to be about 2 million people on it and now there's only 200,000-500,000 people on it Max. (Xbox) And you you know where those million and a half games went, that's right, Game Stop Used shelves. It's a sucky game and a lot of people realized it.

No Shadows of the Damned. That sucks.

@Butmac
If it helps, I don't think they were expecting to make the top of the charts anyways

The only bad thing about Duke Nukem Forever are the load times. Other than that it's a great game.

How can I write this politely? Reviews aren't there for us to agree with. They are there for us to measure the differences between ourselves to determine whether we will like the game. Your taste and the audiences will never line up because of that whole people are snowflakes thing. I love Joystiq but there's not a person on staff you guys have that actually has similar taste to me except occasionally Ludwig. That doesn't stop me from reading everyone's reviews though. Justin for instance has a big enough personality that whether he likes a game or not I usually can figure out whether I will like the game or not from his review. There's enough people in the world to support almost anything, its not a bad thing.

..but the fanboys keep telling me Sony is kicking MS's ass and about to pass them up?

@kcswanko

This is North American sales. The U.S. does not equal the whole world.

@Lucky48 sure, I probably was but it was more of a jab at those guys. I truly could care less.

@liquidsoap89 They do to fanboys... of america!

Still surprised that a 3DS game got on here. I guess Zelda is Zelda.

Also, good on infamous 2, but after getting infamous from welcome back, I'm not sure I'm ready for more of that....

Looks like all those Xbox + $100 gift card sales worked like a charm.
$199 is the magic price point.

@Syesta

Maybe in the US it did. The Xbox has been finishing 3rd or 4th overall throughout all of 2011 Worldwide. Not to mention the fact that their gap in the US has been shrinking since mid 2010.

I don't understand why the NDP even gets press time any longer. Their refusal to acknowledge the rest of the world makes anything they state obsolete.

It would be like saying Pirates 4 was a complete failure because it only earned 238 million domestic. Not even covering the costs of the film. However the 740 million it earned in other locations of the world made it a billion dollar film.

@BeatFreaker

If your numbers are coming from VGcharts you need to look again elsewhere. Vgchartz are very, very wrong.

| 1 | 2 | Most Recent | Next 50 Comments

Duke Nukem Forever

June NPD: Duke Nukem Forever is #2

Reader Comments (86)

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:34PM ItsameMatt03 said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:13PM mywhitenoise said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:31PM Epoque said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:39PM ItsameMatt03 said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 8:10PM Hunter141072 said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 8:13PM deejrandom said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 8:35PM KungFuChaosNinja said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 8:46PM FriedConsole said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 9:36PM Kenoji said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 9:57PM ticklefist said

Posted: Jul 15th 2011 12:50PM Drakkenfyre said

Posted: Jul 15th 2011 10:01PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:35PM BizarroPunisher said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 8:03PM AltairArcanum said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 8:21PM Ordeith said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:36PM Ezio Auditore da Firenze said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:42PM DesmondMiles said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:45PM Ezio Auditore da Firenze said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:56PM BigEgo007 said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:22PM ToTheMoon said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 9:59PM ticklefist said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 10:02PM ironneko said

Posted: Jul 15th 2011 5:21AM WolfForager said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:43PM Reaper man said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:15PM mywhitenoise said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 11:43PM lol speedboat said

Posted: Jul 15th 2011 10:37PM LinkRazr said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:43PM Dreda said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:21PM Godemperor said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:36PM Faceless Troll said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:43PM Shadowbender said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:51PM Stevetrop Man of Mystery said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:55PM liquidsoap89 said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:57PM ItsameMatt03 said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 8:48PM FriedConsole said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:43PM Uncle Jesse said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:45PM 30yearGamer said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:00PM Will96 said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:48PM Butmac said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:06PM Lerkero said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:52PM CaptainHowdy101 said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:53PM MusiM said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:53PM kcswanko said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:56PM liquidsoap89 said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:36PM kcswanko said

Posted: Jul 15th 2011 12:30AM Cavall said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 6:58PM frickandfrak said

Posted: Jul 14th 2011 7:04PM Syesta said

Posted: Jul 15th 2011 3:56PM BeatFreaker said

Posted: Jul 16th 2011 9:25PM Ordeith said

Duke Nukem Forever Info

Description

MSRP

Release Date

Genre

Developer

Publisher

Rating

Breaking News

WB conjures up Harry Potter for Kinect this fall

Featured Stories

Weekly Webcomic Wrapup is a stranger in a strange land

Silver Lining: I Am Alive's unfeeling world

Game Of Thrones and the paradoxes of adaptation

Engadget

TUAW

Massively

WoW