So let’s take a look at 15 of those creepy glitches here!

Broken Face Textures – Assassin’s Creed Unity

No list of glitches is complete without mentioning Assassin’s Creed Unity and it’s missing face textures. The nature of the glitch is also amazing – one instance produces only the character’s teeth and blood-shot eyes, searing into your soul. Another was suitably more terrifying with its mess of textures, eyes and teeth coalescing into what might be a smile. Thanks to the game’s problematic launch, these glitches maintain their infamy to this day.

2019 is dead and gone. Mourn it, regret it, whatever you want to do. It’s dead and done and never, ever coming back. With that death comes to ability to look back and see what was the biggest and best of the year. While the quality is subjective, the cold hard cash that was generated was not. And the two games on top are two of the most predictable ones.

The two big earners were Fortnite on the free to play side with the paid games side seeing FIFA 19 as revealed by VG24/7 through Superdata. It’s actually the second year in a row that Fortnite has taken that spot as it generated $1.8 billion in revenue across all platforms. FIFA 19 generated $786 million on the paid side.

Both lists include plenty of expected games in it like Candy Crush Saga, Grand Theft Auto 5, League of Legends, and many more. You can see both the full paid and free to pay lists below.

Free-to-play

1. Fortnite.
2. Dungeon Fighter Online.
3. Honour of Kings.
4. League of Legends.
5. Candy Crush Saga.
6. Pokemon Go.
7. Crossfire.
8. Fate/Grand Order.
9. Game for Peace.
10. Last Shelter: Survival.

Premium

1. FIFA 19.
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
3. Grand Theft Auto 5.
4. FIFA 20.
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
6. NBA 2K19.
7. The Division 2.
8. Rainbow Six Siege.
9. Borderlands 3.
10. The Sims 4.

UKIE/Gkf Chart-Track have release the data for boxed video game software sales in the UK for the week ending August 10, and it’s been a relatively quieter week, with no new releases charting in the top 10 (or even the top 40)- which makes sense, considering the lack of major new releases in this window (via GamesIndustry). Beenox and Activision’s kart racing remake Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, however, has jumped back to the top of the charts, continuing its steady sales in the UK since release.

Super Mario Maker 2, which has also been at or near the top of the charts since it launched, is in second place again. Meanwhile, fellow Switch exclusive Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sees an impressive bump in sales, and jumps up from seventh spot to the third. FIFA 19 follows behind in fourth place – even as FIFA 20 is merely weeks away from launch – while Grand Theft Auto 5 – the highest selling game in UK in 2019 so far – continues to exhibit long legs at fifth place.

The rest of the top 10 features names that we’ve been seeing in these charts for a few weeks running now as well. You can check out the full top 10 below.

1. 1. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
   2. Super Mario Maker 2
   3. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
   4. FIFA 19
   5. Grand Theft Auto 5
   6. F1 2019
   7. Fire Emblem: Three Houses
   8. Red Dead Redemption 2
   9. Minecraft
   10. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Grand Theft Auto 5 is an absolute behemoth. Though it originally came out in 2013 – six years ago – on the back its supremely successful online component, the game has continued to sell in droves across the world. Just recently, it was announced that the game has shipped over 110 million units worldwide– and we’ve now got another taste of the game’s staying power.

As per data provided by the Entertainment Retail Association (via GamesIndustry), the highest selling game in the UK during the first half of 2019 has been Grand Theft Auto 5. Yes, in spite of all the major new releases and what have you, a six year old game has still managed to top these charts, with sales of over 360,000 units.

It’s even ahead of Rockstar’s own much more recent release, Red Dead Redemption 2, which occupies fourth place with nearly 260,000 units sold. FIFA 19, unsurprisingly, is in second place, while The Division 2 – in spite of lackluster physical sales at launch – is in at third place.

GTA 5 is not the only older game that has continued to perform well though. Ubisoft’s online tactical shooter Rainbow Six Siege is the seventh best selling game in the UK in 2019 so far, with over 175,000 units sold.

Days Gone, which performed consistently well in the UK at launch, has been the best-selling new IP for the year in the region with nearly 230,000 units sold, Anthem is also in the overall top 10, in spite of itself, with over 165,000 units sold. Resident Evil 2 is another notable 2019 launch in the charts, occupying fifth place with sales of nearly 240,000 units.

Collectively, £1.56 billion were spent by UK consumers on games, which is nearly half the expenditure on entertainment media in the country for 2019 so far. Physical video game sales accounted for £184.9 million, down 8.5 per cent over last year. Conversely, digital sales rose 2.4 per cent year-on-year, to £1.38 billion.

You can check out the top 10 highest selling games in the UK during the first half of 2019 – along with how much they sold – below.

1. Grand Theft Auto V (361,312)
2. FIFA 19 (360,588)
3. Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (263,520)
4. Red Dead Redemption 2 (259,931)
5. Resident Evil 2 (239,495)
6. Days Gone (229,182)
7. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege (175,451)
8. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (172,065)
9. Anthem (165,746)
10. Forza Horizon 4 (144,790)

The year is slowly, but surely, ticking away as we barrel on towards 2020. While there’s still a ways to go, it’s not a terrible time to take a look back and see what topped the charts for the better part of 2019. Today we get a look at what the European physical charts looked like.

GamesIndustry looked at the GfK Entertainment data and saw that FIFA 19 and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe were the top two selling titles of the year so far in Europe. While FIFA 19 isn’t too surprising, since the series is known for its long legs until the next game in the franchise comes out, Mario is a little more so when you consider it was a remaster of a Wii U game and only came out on one platform, as opposed to the four that FIFA did.

They topped the likes of Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, Days Gone, and Minecraft. The GfK data only includes physical sales, since several publishers do not share digital numbers with them, but still it’s an impressive feat all the same. Data is taken from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and the UK.

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s get right into it. First, there is one indisputable component in Wilson’s statement—most Switch owners do own either an Xbox One or a PS4 alongside their Switch. This is a statement that is corroborated by official NPD data, as an example. So inasmuch as that goes, Wilson is correct.

The problem is with literally everything else that was said here. EA’s statement makes next to no sense given the nature of the Nintendo Switch and the success third parties in general have found on the platform—and they have found a lot of success on the Switch. Diablo 3 is one of the bestselling games on the system according to the NPD Group. Bethesda continues to find success with their continued efforts on the platform. Mortal Kombat 11 on Switch was the bestselling game on the system the month it launched. Tales of Vesperia sold the best on the Switch in the UK, a territory that is usually Nintendo’s worst performing one. All of this is without getting into the kind of success that indie games such as Celeste, Dead Cells, and Hollow Knight have seen on the Nintendo Switch.

But then we have EA. EA says Switch owners would rather play EA games on other systems, so let’s take a moment to try and see why that might be. To date, there have been four EA games on the Nintendo Switch—FIFA 18, FIFA 19, Fe, and Unravel Two. Fe and Unravel Two are smaller, indie releases, with the former being criticized for being a poor port, and the latter launching without fanfare almost a year after it had been available everywhere else. FIFA 18 and FIFA 19 were feature incomplete, hobbled versions of the game—they didn’t use Frostbite Engine like the PlayStation and Xbox versions, they lacked some crucial Ultimate Team content, they lacked the Journey story mode, and FIFA 18 didn’t even let you play online with friends! At that point, is it a wonder that most people who want FIFA chose to play it on consoles that got a proper version of the game?

That right there is EA’s data pool—two pared back ports of games that received absolutely no marketing from them, and which then went on to obviously underperform relative to the other, full featured, prominently marketed ones, and two indie games they published under their Originals label, and which almost certainly don’t factor into their decision making.

If this is the data EA has made this decision based on, then it is a bad decision informed by irrelevant data. The irrelevance of this data is, again, demonstrated by the widespread success that other third parties have seen, and continue to see, on the Switch. That success is the reason we have started to see so many “impossible” ports on the Nintendo Switch—to be clear, this is the platform that got ports of DOOM, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, day and date releases for the next games in those franchises, a day and date release of Mortal Kombat 11, and has a release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, one of the most technically demanding and impressive games of this generation, lined up for later this year.

Those games are, obviously, not easy to get to run on the Switch—the Switch is an impressive bit of kit, especially given its form factor, but it is also undeniably far weaker than the PS4 and Xbox One. Putting a game like The Witcher 3 or DOOM on the system requires time, money, and effort, because unlike with other systems, you need to develop around the system’s limitations. And yet, developers continue to announce these ports—we just got an announcement that The Outer Worlds is coming to the Switch recently.

Why are developers putting in that time, money, and effort? Clearly because they more than get the return on their effort and investment, because third party titles sell exceedingly well on the Switch, better than they have on any Nintendo system in probably decades. Third party publishers that put in the effort and released actual good products on the system, that they then marketed, saw success. EA, being the outlier in terms of that—releasing a poor product that it also didn’t market—proceeded to not see that success, and then chose to use that as justification for not supporting the Switch.

Here’s the thing, of course, EA is fully within its rights to not support a system it doesn’t feel fits with the products it releases. As an example, Frostbite has not been ported to the Switch, and a lot of EA’s releases run on that engine. Most EA releases have a significant online component, and the Switch’s online is, well, not the best. Not seeing Anthem or Battlefield on the Switch makes total sense.

But what about titles like The Sims 4, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, or Burnout Paradise Remastered, which is a port of a last generation game? Those games have very pointedly ignored the Switch as well, in spite of them being very good matches for the console from a demographic and technological perspective. At that point, it’s clear there’s no actual reason for the publisher to not support the console, other than… they just don’t want to? At this point it’s clear EA is unwilling to put even the minimum possible effort into the Switch, given that FIFA 20’s Switch version is literally a reskinned re-release of last year’s game in the guise of a “Legacy Edition”.

Of course, it’s not like EA’s lineup this generation has actually been something that the Switch is missing out on. Their sports franchises have increasingly grown stagnant, as they chase the microtransaction money, they have entirely mishandled their Star Wars license, having put out two disappointing games, and canceled at least as many, Need for Speed is now worse than it has been in ages, Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem were embarrassments at launch… there’s not much in EA’s catalog that would actually actively add to the Switch’s library, and the best demonstration of that is the fact that the Switch continues to be one of the fastest selling consoles of all time even without any support from EA.

There was once a time—not too long ago—when EA’s lack of support could single-handedly sink a console. When EA announced they would not support the Dreamcast, they precipitated a domino effect of other third parties also pulling out, and the Dreamcast ended up being discontinued just two years after its release. More recently, when EA confirmed they would not support the Wii U shortly after its launch, they, once again, triggered a ripple effect with most third parties bailing from supporting the system, and the Wii U ending up as Nintendo’s worst selling console of all time. But today? Today, it doesn’t seem to matter. EA is making more money than it ever has before, off the back of Ultimate Team, but their larger relevance in terms of the larger industry appears to be… not as much as it once used to be.

So the Switch continues to soldier on, and EA has just locked itself out of a marketplace that is clearly thriving and could add to their revenues. And that, more than anything, is something that should give EA investors pause. EA is far too entrenched in the current market paradigm, and seems to be entirely resistant to seek potential growth avenues, even outright rejecting them. EA remains one of the only major publishers that didn’t attempt anything major with VR, the only major publisher that has given up on the Switch, and the only major publisher that doesn’t seem to have any actual substantial support for upcoming major platforms like the Stadia announced.

We can discuss all day about those other platforms and avenues—except for the Switch, which, as discussed, is a proven success, VR and Stadia are both on shakier ground, after all. But the point here is that EA doesn’t even try. Other companies do. But EA is far too happy and complacent in the current marketplace, and not even considering looking ahead from it. That’s great in the short term—but in the long term, they could end up missing out on very real, tangible, large markets due to how slow they are to react and respond.

And in the immediate here and now? EA’s doing great without Nintendo. Nintendo’s doing great without EA. But I just find myself wishing that EA was more honest about why it is doing what it is doing, if nothing else.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Electronic Arts is among the many publishers to reveal its latest fiscal results. Net revenue for the first quarter of FY2019-20 was at $1.2 billion, while operating income hit $415 million, with net bookings reaching $743 million (down 22 percent year-over-year). Net income reached $1.4 billion, thanks to an income tax benefit.

However, one of the more important statistics is the publisher’s digital sales. They’re up 7 percent year-over-year, and in fact, 47 percent of total unit sales for all games are digital. Notable contributors to this include FIFA Ultimate Team having over three million players logging in daily during the Team of the Season event. Meanwhile, The Sims 4 saw a 55 percent increase in expansion packs and game downloads year-over-year. Though Apex Legends has faced a decline since launch, EA said it still gets 8 to 10 million players per week.

Mobile efforts are also going very well, with a 17 percent growth year-over-year for $122 million in net bookings for the quarter. Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes also hit a strong milestone, with almost 80 million players in its lifetime. Full year projects include a net revenue of $5.4 billion, net bookings of $5.1 billion, and net income of $2.8 billion.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 was Nintendo’s big Switch exclusive release for July, and though it saw a fairly lukewarm debut in Japan as far as sales are concerned, reports pegged it as having a stronger than expected launch in the United States? And how about the UK? UKIE / Gfk Chart-Track have released the sales data for boxed video game sales in the UK for the week ending July 20, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order debuted in second place in the charts.

That means that Super Mario Maker 2, which had been topping the weekly charts since its launch last month, has been dethroned. It moved down from the top spot, which it occupied last week, to third place. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled returns to the top spot, thanks to a boost in sales enjoyed during Amazon Prime Day. Dragon Quest Builders 2, which debuted in fifth place last week, has fallen out of the top 10- in fact, it very nearly fell out of the top 40, and occupies thirty-eighth place.

The rest of the top 10 sees a lot of familiar faces. FIFA 19, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe chart high as always, while F1 2019 has dropped down a bit, but still hangs on in the top 10. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has seen a massive boost, moving up from 30th place to seventh this week, while Spider-Man also enjoys a bump, coming in from 21st to 9th.

You can check out the full top 10 below.

1. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
2. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order
3. Super Mario Maker 2
4. FIFA 19
5. Red Dead Redemption 2
6. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
7. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
8. F1 2019
9. Marvel’s Spider-Man
10. Mortal Kombat 11

Electronic Arts’ July lineup for Origin Access is looking pretty good, especially for Basic subscribers. The titles this month include They Are Billions (previously available via Origin Access Premier), Frostpunk, Moonlighter, and FIFA 19. Of course, Premier members can also get their hands on new games like Sea of Solitude, A Plague Tale: Innocence, and later in the month, Madden NFL 20.

However, not all games will be available right now. Sea of Solitude, Moonlighter, A Plague Tale: Innocence, and Frostpunk can be currently played in their respective subscription tiers. They Are Billions will be added on June 18th, and might be worth trying out if you’re wary about the new campaign.

FIFA 19 and Madden NFL 20 will round out the month. The former arrives on July 24th. Madden NFL 20 follows EA’s practice of releasing full-price games a week early on Origin Access Premier. It’s great for trying out all the new changes, like the X-Factor abilities and Face of the Franchise: QB1 mode.

Activision and Beenox’s remake of the 1999 PS1 classic, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, was this week’s biggest new release, and unsurprisingly, it has topped the UK boxed sales charts, as per the data provided for the week ending June 22 by UKIE/GfK Chart-Track (via GamesIndustry). It is, in fact, the third biggest launch week for a game in the UK this year, behind Sony’s Days Gone, and Capcom’s Resident Evil 2. 

The kart racer also enjoys the second best debut the Crash franchise has seen in the UK, second to Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy back in 2017, which saw exceptionally strong sales for a prolonged period a couple years back in the region. Meanwhile, FIFA 19 is in at second place, though trailing Crash Team Racing by a considerable gap, having sold eight times fewer copies.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was another major new release this week, but it didn’t manage to break it into the top 10, debuting instead in 17th place. You can check out the full top 10 below.

1. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
2. FIFA 19
3. Forza Horizon 4
4. Days Gone
5. Red Dead Redemption 2
6. Battlefield 5
7. Grand Theft Auto 5
8. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
9. The Division 2
10. Anthem