August video game sales continue a general downward slump, just as they did in July, according to industry-tracking firm Circana. Overall game sales are down 9%, with content and hardware contributing to the year’s overall negative balance, and a large part of that is due to how expensive video game consoles are becoming.
“The average price paid for a new unit of video game hardware in the US reached an August record $541,” said Mat Piscatella, Circana’s director of video games. “The previous August record was $476, set a year ago… Total August 2026 video game hardware unit sales fell 15% versus a year ago to 559k units, the lowest total for an August month since 2013.”
Other sources of decline in August were in mobile, with Sensor Tower reporting that spending dropped 18% year-over-year. A mild increase in physical software spend was driven largely by a 631% increase in physical game key card buying.
Accessories, as a category, are the only one that showed growth in August (though this could be because of relatively low sales last August). According to Piscatella, this is because of increase in Remote Play Device spending, which grew 39% year-over-year. The best-selling device in this category was the PlayStation Portal.
For a month in which sales were not the most robust, we certainly got a large number of new games on the charts. Three slots in the top five were given up to sports sims, those being top-seller NBA 2K27 and Madden NFL 27, but staples in long-running series.
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