Every month, Circana video game analyst Mat Piscatella posts fascinating data about video game sales on Bluesky, highlighting trends like November’s historically bad month for game hardware and Battlefield 6’s big launch in October. But he doesn’t just share data about what is selling the most; as of late, he’s also posted delightful lists of games that have sold just a single physical copy over a certain period of time, and the lists often include retro games that take me down memory lane or titles that I didn’t even know existed.
The list of games that sold one physical copy in October, for example, includes the Xbox 360 version of Burnout Paradise and Hasbro Family Game Night 3 for the PS3. On Thursday, Piscatella posted the “2025 Circana Thread for Sickos” highlighting games that only sold one physical unit over the whole year across various handhelds and consoles.
That list of games that sold a single unit in October was born out of a question from a user on Bluesky, Piscatella tells The Verge. “People seemed to enjoy the combination of journey down memory lane and the treasure hunting idea of these games being out there somewhere,” Piscatella says. Then people started asking him about it, so he thought it’d be fun to keep doing it.
Circana is able to track the data because it has agreements with “all major retailers” that let it compile and analyze point-of-sale data, Piscatella says. “If a retailer’s point-of-sale system scans a product as a sale, it will show up in the data.” That means all the games he has mentioned in these threads “had one new unit floating around out there somehow that was sold through a register or via an online purchase. Perhaps it was a unit that had been lost somewhere in the back, or was buried under a display, or who knows.”
While it’s fun to look back and laugh at some of the games people bought — I feel sorry for the poor soul who purchased Metroid: Other M for the Wii last year — people buying an older, obscure game from a store is more common than you might think, Piscatella says. “There were more than 1,000 games across all platforms (including PC) that sold between one and five new physical units in the US during 2025, while over 3,500 different games sold at least one new physical unit at retail last year overall,” according to Piscatella. “Retailers have all kinds of stuff hidden away in those stores of theirs.”
I asked Piscatella how long he plans to continue making the threads highlighting games selling just one copy. “So long as it stays fun, I reckon,” he says. “But who knows.”
