NPD crowns Call of Duty the top-selling console game franchise in U.S. for 10th year in a row

Today the team behind Call of Duty published a blog post celebrating the fact that the NPD Group has named Call of Duty the #1 best-selling console game franchise of the year in the U.S. for a decade straight.

The streak starts in 2009 with the debut of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and ends on last year's Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. While The NPD Group's market data is notoriously incomplete, the numbers are pretty reliable when you're looking at console games -- especially console games that, like Call of Duty, still sell a lot of physical copies.

It's no surprise that a Call of Duty game would sell well (though series sales have slumped in the past), but it is interesting to see the company cross the finish line on this decade-long streak with Black Ops 4, which is significantly unlike any other game in the series.

It famously has no single-player campaign, for one thing, and it's the first Call of Duty PC game to be sold on Battle.net instead of Steam. Plus it has a new battle royale mode, Blackout, and late last year a special discounted "Battle Edition" of the game was put on sale last year that cut out the game's co-op Zombies multiplayer mode in favor of just offering classic multiplayer and Blackout.