I wanted to show it as an oddity, and that sometimes Amazon throws up some quite divergent results to the mainstream. Having said that I think divergent results on Amazon are probably more likely to come along at the end of a generation when hardware sales are falling away. So early to mid gen Amazon should be a reasonable reflection of the market as a whole.

Dup.

There is a mistake in the table... PS3 won NPD September due GTAV bundle.

OP corrected. I read the NPD 2012 column as the NPD 2013, and there was no NPD 2013 colum, seems we got no numbers that month. Shoulda read the thread title aye?

My impression is that Amazon is less reliable as an indicator of software. OTOH, CoD is slipping in sales and it's entirely possible for Halo MCC to at least initially outsell every individual sku of AW. But legs will tell. I always thought it was a shame for the highest selling FPS franchise on 360 to be CoD, it really should have been Halo. Hopefully this generation Halo will take back its rightful place as the top-selling FPS franchise on Xbox. Then again I think Halo is dropping in sales too. So we'll see whether either franchise can refresh itself.

Checking recent Amazon monthlies:

June: MK8 #1, Age of Empired II HD #5, GTAV 360 #6, Watchdogs PS4 #17, Minecraft PS3 #21, Minecraft 360 #26...a whole bunch of other games...Watchdogs PS3 #57. Watchdogs topped the sales in June NPD PS4>360>X1>PS3. MK8 was 2nd and of course most likely the highest selling on a single platform. But if you looked at Amazon you's have said MK8 would top Watchdogs regardless because most of the SKUs were way down the list.

July: Amazon and NPD were aligned in putting TLOU on top. But the order after that does not correlate too well.

August: You would have been brave to pick Madden as top game based on Amazon, though 3 skus in the top 40 would have been a clue, even though its top sku was only at 16 and TLOUR, Diablo III, and MK8 were all ahead of it. Still if margins in the top 20 are small then 2 more skus in the top 40 would put it ahead.

Here's what Oct Amazon looks like:

9 Bayo2, 12 Shadow of Mordor PS4, 16 NBA2k15 PS4, 20 Borderlands tPS 360

21 Madden 360, 22 Fifa PS4, 24 Minecraft 360, 28 Destiny 360 (Destiny PS4 bundle is higher, but won't be counted in NPD right?), 32 Fifa PS3, 33 Fifa 360, 34 GTAV 360, 39 The Evil Within PS4, 40 MK8

45 Shadow of Mordor X1, 48 GTAV PS3, 50 Minecraft PS3, 54 TLOUR, 55 TLOU, 58 HyWa, 60 NBA2k15 360

Franchises in order of appearance: Bayo, Shadow of Mordor, NBA2K, Borderlands, Madden, Fifa, Minecraft, Destiny, GTAV, The Evil Within, MK8, TLOU, HyWa

That's 12 franchises, so in theory the NPD top 10 should be 10 out of those 12 titles. But does that look like the right order? According to VGC NBA 2K 15 should be the top seller on NPD with close to 1 million, followed by Shadow of Mordor, then The Evil Within, then maybe Bayo 2 or Madden or Fifa.