The best-selling piece of video game hardware earlier this summer was not the surging Nintendo Switch nor the dominant PlayStation 4—it was a miniature version of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
That’s the word from retail analyst NPD Group, which reports that “the NES Classic was June 2018’s highest unit-selling hardware platform, while the PlayStation 4 led the market in dollar sales” for the period between June 3 and July 7.
The NES Classic, which costs $60 and emulates 30 games from Nintendo’s first home console, launched in November 2016 to mass shortages as Nintendo underestimated demand. Although the publisher announced that it was discontinuing the device, it later committed to bringing the NES Classic back to stores in 2018. Starting on June 29, the system returned. And then it beat up all the other consoles.
Nintendo’s SNES Classic also became the best-selling console for the month it launched, in September, 2017. There is still no word on a Game Boy or Nintendo 64 Classic.
