WTF?! Remember Spore, the PC game that released in 2008 to rave reviews? Last month, just over 17 years since it launched, somebody in the US bought a physical copy of Maxis' genre-blending title. It was one of several games that sold a single physical copy throughout October, most of which were as old as, if not older, than Spore.
Mat Piscatella, video game analyst and senior director of Circana, often reveals sales figures for multi-million-selling games and hardware. On Bluesky, he revealed something a little different: some of the games that sold a single physical unit in the US last month.
Spore is the only PC game on the list. I remember playing it at the time and being awed by the technical aspect of evolving a microscopic organism into a spacefaring race – and the creature creator was brilliant fun. It still has a Very Positive rating on Steam for both overall and recent reviews.
Among video games selling 1 new physical unit in Oct (US): 360 Burnout Paradise 3DS Carnival Games: Wild West 3D GBA Incredibles 2: Rise of the Underminer NDA Imagine Fashion Stylist PC Spore PS2 Backyard Baseball (!!!!) PS3 Hasbro Family Game Night 3 PS4 Cooking Mama Cookstar XBX Ultra Bust A Move
– Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social) 20 November 2025 at 15:10
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Someone buying a physical copy of any PC game these days is a rare occurrence. Beyond retro enthusiasts looking to add to their collections, very few people have a working PC with an optical drive. Perhaps someone just thought it would look cool on a shelf, or wanted the disc for a coaster.
Spore isn't the oldest game on the list: that honor goes to Backyard Baseball, which was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2004. Only slightly younger is Ultra Bust-A-Move – the Xbox version was released in November that same year.
Here's Piscatella's full list, starting with the oldest game.
| Name | Platform | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Backyard Baseball | PlayStation 2 | March 23, 2004 |
| Ultra Bust-A-Move | Xbox | November 4, 2004 |
| The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer | Game Boy Advance | November 1, 2005 |
| Burnout Paradise | Xbox 360 | January 22, 2008 |
| Spore | PC | September 7, 2008 |
| Hasbro Family Game Night 3 | PlayStation 3 | October 26, 2010 |
| Imagine: Fashion Stylist | Nintendo DS | November 3, 2010 |
| Carnival Games: Wild West 3D | Nintendo 3DS | November 21, 2011 |
| Cooking Mama: Cookstar | PlayStation 4 | April 28, 2020 |
Another Bluesky user asked the analyst if there were any games that sold only two copies last month. Piscatella confirmed that there were, and Tom Clancy's End War on the PSP (released on November 4, 2008) was one of them.
As for the more traditional list of best-selling games, Battlefield 6 was October 2025's No. 1 top seller despite being on sale for just three weeks. Its first-month sales volume surpassed the lifetime sales of Battlefield 1. It also had the highest one-month physical full-game dollar sales in the US for any game since 2022.