Elden Ring enjoys biggest launch of a Souls game ever in UK charts
FromSoftware’s latest game is their fastest selling ever, as Elden Ring is thought to have beaten Horizon Forbidden West with digital sales.
Given the ever increasing percentage of game sales that are digital, even the biggest modern sequels tend to sell at least 50% less than their predecessor, when it comes to the physical sales charts. The older the previous game the bigger the drop and yet physical sales of Elden Ring work out as 26% more than 2016’s Dark Souls 3.
Technically speaking, Elden Ring isn’t a Souls game but it also sold more than Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which had, up till now, shown a clear decline in sales for FromSoftware’s games.
Elden Ring becomes the third biggest physical launch of the year, behind Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Horizon Forbidden West, but has likely beaten the latter once digital sales are taken into consideration – given a larger percentage of Xbox owners buy digitally when compared to PlayStation gamers.
As it stands, 63% of physical sales of the game were on PlayStation 5, with 17% for both PlayStation 4 and Xbox, and just 3% for PC.
Horizon Forbidden West saw sales fall by 79% in its second week, which is a little more than usual for a big release but still with accepted norms. Pokémon Legends: Arceus though saw sales increase by 5%, perhaps in anticipation for Sunday’s Pokémon Presents livestream.
There was only one other new entry in the top 40, the curiously underpromoted GRID Legends from EA and Codemasters, which could only manage a debut at number 18 and is unlikely to do much better once Gran Turismo 7 is released later this week.
How well Gran Turismo 7 itself does though is hard to predict, as there hasn’t been a numbered sequel since 2013, which makes the gap
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