The big picture: The Nintendo Switch remains the best-selling gaming platform of 2019. According to a recent report from The NPD Group analyst Mat Piscatella, the Switch again topped the charts in November and with the holidays rapidly approaching combined with aging hardware from the competition and no shortage of attractive Switch bundles on offer, there's little reason to believe December will be any different.

Despite the Switch's success, spending across video game hardware as a whole was down 19 percent in November compared to the same period a year ago. When pulling back to look at the entire gaming industry including hardware, software and accessories, we see that year-to-date spending dropped 12 percent versus the same time in 2018.

In the software category, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 was the top-selling game across all major platforms in November followed by Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield. The new Modern Warfare also topped the year-to-date sales charts. NBA 2K20, Madden NFL 20, Borderlands 3 and Mortal Kombat 11 finished as runners-up in that category, in that order.

The gaming industry has a bright future ahead of it as Microsoft last night revealed its next-gen Xbox at The Game Awards. Due out in time for the 2020 holiday season, the Xbox Series X will reportedly pack in four times the amount of processing power as the Xbox One X.

Hardware specific and pricing haven't yet been revealed but we did get an early look at the new system which heavily resembles a desktop PC (namely, the SilverStone Fortress Series FT03 case).

Sony is also expected to have its PlayStation 5 ready to go within the same launch window.