Middle-Earth: Shadow Of War Dominates October Sales Numbers

The NPD Group has officially unveiled its sales numbers for October 2017, and although Nintendo had a dominant month with hardware and software, there was a surprising game taking the number one spot.

WB Games' Middle-Earth: Shadow of War dominated in the first place position, winning over fans with a revamped system of what worked so well in Shadow of Mordor, while throwing in a number of new features. The game also took the number one spot in both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 sales, along with sales in general.

Following close behind was Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Origins, which performed admirably considering it had a release later in the month – October 27th, to be precise. The game also dominated the second place position on both the Xbox One and PS4 charts.

Super Mario Odyssey followed in third, with South Park: The Fractured But Whole close behind in fourth and NBA 2K18 in fifth.

Here's the full top twenty. Make sure you note that titles with an asterisk – in this case, Bethesda's games – didn't include digital copies sold.

1. Middle-earth: Shadow of War
2. Assassin's Creed Origins
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
11. Gran Turismo Sport
12. Grand Theft Auto V
13. The Evil Within 2*
14. Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus*
15. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild*
16. Mario Kart 8*
17. Fire Emblem: Warriors*
18. Ghost Recon: Wildlands
19. NHL 18
20. Rainbow Six Siege

The company also made note of a few trends with sales numbers, including racing games more than doubling compared to October 2016, thanks to titles like Forza Motorsport 7 and Gran Turismo Sport; role-playing games saw a 20 percent leap over the previous year; and Destiny 2 has had no trouble becoming the best-selling title of 2017 thus far. (That could change with the launch of Call of Duty: WWII this month.)

In addition, Activision Blizzard was listed as the most successful company of the year thus far, while Ubisoft had a pretty great month for October, thanks to games like Assassin's Creed Origins.

We previously reported that the Nintendo Switch was the best-selling hardware of the month, but PlayStation 4 is dominating the year. Overall hardware spending reached $238 million, up ten percent from the previous October period. That brings the total spending this year to $2.3 billion, up 19 percent from 2016.

We'll see what November brings with so many new releases on the market!