Gaming tastes differ around the world, and what plays well in one country often doesn’t even trouble the charts in another. Thus a report combining sales figures from Japan, the USA and the UK is possibly a little meaningless. Which is not to say that it isn’t interesting…

So go on, take a guess - in descending order, what were the five biggest selling titles across the above territories between July and September ‘08?

Likely you’ll get two or three and maybe in the correct positions too, but would you have placed Madden NFL 09 at number one? Thought not, but nearly three million sales says otherwise. Here’s how it all stacks up, according to data compiled by Enterbrain, the NPD group and Gfk:

1. Madden NFL 09 (2,994,000)
2. Wii Fit (2,089,000)
3. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (1,738,000)
4. Pokemon Platinum (1,482,000)
5. Mario Kart Wii (1,468,000)

Putting things into a little context Madden NFL 09 only sold 36,000 copies outside of the USA (which proves the point made in the intro) and, of course, Pokemon Platinum hasn’t been released outside of Japan yet. Meanwhile the report reveals that the UK has the largest aggregate growth of all territories - 15% up in terms of console/handheld software sales, compared to just 8% growth in the US. Hooray for us, and small wonder that “unprecedented heights” are already being predicted for the fourth quarter. All things considered we’d say yep, definitely!