According to The Verge, Circana video game analyst Mat Piscatella has been sharing a bizarre and delightful sales trend on Bluesky. He posts lists of games that sold just one single physical copy in a given period, like the Xbox 360 version of Burnout Paradise or Hasbro Family Game Night 3 for PS3 in October. This started from a user question and evolved into his “2025 Circana Thread for Sickos,” detailing games that sold one unit all year. Circana tracks this because it has agreements with all major US retailers to compile point-of-sale data, meaning each listed game was a new unit scanned at a register. In 2025, over 3,500 different games sold at least one new physical unit, with more than 1,000 selling between one and five copies. Piscatella says he’ll keep making the threads “so long as it stays fun.”
The retail archaeology of a single scan
Here’s the thing that fascinates me about this data. It’s not really about sales, is it? It’s retail archaeology. Each of those single scans tells a story of a product that, against all odds, avoided the clearance bin, the warehouse purge, or the landfill for over a decade. Piscatella speculates it could be a unit lost in the back, buried under a display, or who knows what. I picture some retail employee, years after a console’s death, finding a single dusty copy of Metroid: Other M behind a stack of printer paper and actually managing to sell it. That’s a minor miracle in itself. It reveals how messy and physical the retail world still is, full of forgotten inventory hiding in plain sight.
What does “one copy” even mean?
So, who buys these things? That’s the real question. Is it a nostalgic collector completing a set? A curious kid in a GameStop who found the weirdest, cheapest thing on the shelf? Or just someone who made a genuinely terrible purchase decision? Probably all of the above. But Piscatella’s numbers are the real kicker. Over 3,500 *different* games sold at least one new physical unit last year. That’s a huge long tail of software. It basically means that for every blockbuster selling millions, there’s a vast, silent sea of forgotten titles still trickling out, one agonizingly slow sale at a time. It’s a beautiful counter-narrative to the industry’s obsession with mega-hits.
The data is the treasure
Look, I love this. In an era of billion-dollar quarterly reports and endless live-service metrics, this is the most human gaming data out there. It’s not useful for forecasting or strategy. It’s just fun. It sparks memory lane journeys and inside jokes, like the shared pity for that *Metroid: Other M* buyer. Piscatella has tapped into something special by sharing these niche lists and the “sickos” thread. It turns dry sales data into a community treasure hunt, wondering where that last copy of a forgotten PS2 game might be lurking. And honestly, in an industry that often takes itself too seriously, we need more of that. Long may the sickos thread continue.
