Battlefield 3 Beats Batman: Arkham City During October

October might have seen a number of high profile video game launches but the NPD Group delivered figures are showing that the industry performed worse than the analyst expected it to.

Battlefield 3, the first person shooter from Swedish developer DICE and publisher Electronic Arts, has been the best selling game of the month, beating Batman: Arkham City, the open world action game from Warner Bros. and Rocksteady.

EA has already said that it has managed to sell more than 5 million copies of the game during its first week on sale, while shipping more than 10 million.

Batman: Arkham City is set to have sold 1.5 million through retail and the launch of the PC version of the game during November is set to add to the total.

The rest of the top ten is made up of:

NBA 2K12 for the Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, Wii, PS2, PC
RAGE available on the Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Just Dance 3 for the Wii, Xbox 360
Dark Souls launched on PS3, Xbox 360
Madden NFL 12 available on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP
Forza Motorsport 4 on the Xbox 360
Gears of War 3 for the Xbox 360
FIFA Soccer 12 available on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PSP, PS2, 3DS

Anita Frazier, who is an analyst commenting on the numbers for the NPD Group, has stated, “New software releases performed very well this month. Seven of the top 10 titles were new October releases, and the top 10 titles sold 23 percent more units than did the top 10 last October.”

She also commented on the Battlefield 3 sales figures, saying, “Of course, given its strong heritage in PC gaming, I would expect that there were notable sales that occurred via digital downloading as well.”

Overall sales for the software market reached 621.3 million dollars (451 million Euro) which is just about 3 percent more than during the same period of 2010.