Spending was up 12% compared with the same period a year earlier, but the overall picture still is not quite as clean as it first looks.
Mat Piscatella, executive director and games industry analyst at Circana, has published the U.S. sales charts for March. Unsurprisingly, MLB The Show 26 topped the monthly ranking, and together with Crimson Desert and Pokémon Pokopia, it helped drive consumer spending up by 12% compared with March of last year. Piscatella also cited Crimson Desert as one of the key drivers behind that growth, but when the full top 20 best-selling games list is measured by dollar revenue, combining both physical and digital sales, Pearl Abyss’ open-world title only managed to reach 15th place. Even so, it still finished ahead of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, which jumped from 165th the previous month to 16th thanks to its PC launch.
The top 10, however, did include Pokémon Pokopia, which landed in 5th place, and Bungie’s new extraction shooter Marathon, which climbed all the way to 4th. Resident Evil Requiem claimed 2nd place, while WWE 2K26 took 3rd. It is important to remember that these charts are based on revenue in dollars, not units sold. Piscatella also noted that, in terms of estimated total spending on full games, Crimson Desert, MLB The Show 26, and Pokémon Pokopia led the field, but at least in U.S. dollar revenue, Crimson Desert still fell short of the top 10. That makes Marathon’s 4th-place finish even more interesting, especially since Marathon sells for $40 while Crimson Desert costs $70.
MLB The Show 26, WWE 2K26, Marathon, Pokémon Pokopia, and Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection all made it into the U.S. top 20 for 2026 so far, while Crimson Desert did not. This year’s MLB currently sits as the second best-selling game of the year in the United States, still behind Resident Evil Requiem. WWE 2K26 is in 3rd, Marathon is in 6th, Pokopia narrowly missed the top 10 in 12th place, and Monster Hunter Stories 3 is 15th.
How is it possible that Crimson Desert misses the top 10 for the month on revenue and is absent from the overall 2026 list, despite supposedly selling at least 5 million copies, while Marathon, which appears on both charts, is only estimated at around 1.2 million units? The answer is most likely that these are U.S.-only figures. We do not have official sell-through data for Marathon, and it is entirely possible that Crimson Desert simply performed much better worldwide, while Marathon’s audience is more concentrated in a few major regions, including the United States. The platform-specific charts reinforce that idea: Marathon appears across the March rankings for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, while Crimson Desert appears only on the PlayStation list, and even there it finished below Marathon.
On the hardware side, March clearly belonged to the Nintendo Switch 2. It was the best-selling piece of gaming hardware for the month and helped drive hardware spending up by 69% compared with March 2025. The PlayStation 5 was the second best-selling console of the month, and spending on it rose by 3% year over year. As the Switch 2 approaches its one-year anniversary, Piscatella says that its first ten months of unit sales in the United States are running 12% ahead of the original Switch over the same period.
So overall, March still counts as a strong month for the U.S. games business, because spending on software, hardware, and accessories all increased compared with March 2025.
Source: WCCFTech, Bsky 1, Bsky 2, Bsky 3, Bsky 4
