Dragon Quest IX Debuts In July’s Top-Ten Sellers In U.S. [Update]

First the UK sales charts, and now the NPDs. Dragon Quest IX has been receiving some great word of mouth, and it shows — the game debuted at the #7 position in the July NPDs, which is a first for any of the series’s latest titles.

While the NPD chart below doesn’t include it — PC software sales are tracked using a different chart — the actual best-selling game for the month of July was, unsurprisingly, StarCraft II at 721,000 units. SCII helped the PC games category to realize a 103% increase in dollars over last July.

If one were to consider combined sales across all platforms, NCAA Football 11 and Lego Harry Potter: Years 1 – 4 would take up the #2 and #3 positions for July’s best-sellers respectively. Meanwhile, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is finally beginning to set itself apart from Red Dead Redemption, thanks to the long-tailed nature of its sales.

Videogame software sales as a whole in July contributed $403.3 million toward total industry revenue, down 8% from the same period last year.

Year-to-date software revenue, too, was down 8%, although, we’d like to point out again that StarCraft II sales do not count toward these numbers. If one were to count sales of SCII, revenue was up 4% compared to July of last year.

Coming back to Dragon Quest IX, it should be interesting to see if continued advertising from Nintendo and events like the Penny Arcade Expo (which will almost certainly be a prime location to use the game’s Tag Mode) help the game’s staying power in the coming months.

Update: A press release from Nintendo says Dragon Quest IX sold more than 132,000 units in July.