According to The NPD Group, consumers spent over $43 billion on video games throughout 2018. That marks an 18% increase over 2017 spending. There are a couple of important notes about this. This figure is for both software and hardware. It also does not take into account digital sales since the NPD cannot reliably track digital sales figures.

The best selling title of the year was Red Dead Redemption 2. The second and third best selling titles in 2018 were Call of Duty: Black...