Despite Releasing in 2017, Pokemon Ultra Sun/Moon Were the Best-Selling Games on 3DS in 2018

Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon

Earlier today, like they do once a month, the NPD group has released sales data for video game software and hardware for the month of December and the entirety of 2018. Records were broken, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate took home some trophies, the Switch sold like hotcakes, and all around, 2018 proved to be an incredible year for the industry.

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You can read our news article earlier today on the best-selling games of December 2018 if you want more info on that, but we’re here to talk about the best-selling games on a handheld that people seem to have pushed to the side, thanks to the success of the Switch.

Mat Piscatella of the NPD group posted data showing the top 10 best-selling 3DS titles in 2018, which you can see below. Taking a deeper look into this just shows how popular the handheld and its games truly are.

We just needed to point out the sheer fact that almost all of these top 10 games were not even released in 2018, besides Luigi’s Mansion and Detective Pikachu, which sit at the bottom half of the list.

To nobody’s surprise, the twin second installments?of the 7th generation of Pokemon, Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, take the number one and number two spots, respectively.

To be completely quite honest, there weren’t any huge 3DS games released in 2018 anyway, so it makes sense to see this list flooded with titles from years past. We can even see that Mario Kart 7 takes the number three spot, even though it’s an 8-year-old game (wow).

You can see the list for yourself:

2018 Top 10 Nintendo 3DS Games (Physical Only) ranked on dollar sales

  1. Pokemon Ultra Sun
  2. Pokemon Ultra Moon
  3. Mario Kart 7
  4. Super Smash Bros. for 3DS
  5. Detective Pikachu
  6. Super Mario 3D Land
  7. Minecraft
  8. Luigi’s Mansion
  9. Mario Party: The Top 100
  10. Super Mario Maker

What do you guys make of the top-selling 3DS games of the past year? Did you happen to be a late 3DS adopter or recently purchase any of these titles physically? Let us know in the comments section below!

Also, if you’re interested in learning more about any of these titles, you can always read up on our reviews –of which we have plenty:


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Greysun Morales
Greysun was formerly the Features Editor at Twinfinite and wrote for the site from 2017 to 2020. He eats ramen 12 times a week and will never get tired of it. Playing Games Since: 1993, Favorite Genres: Action-Adventure, JRPG, Platformers, and Anything With Ramen