PlayStation’s 2021 Top Sellers Are Depressing
thegamer.comSony recently revealed the biggest selling PlayStation games of 2021, and they make for depressing reading. I wasn’t expecting The Artful Escape to be in there (mainly because it’s an Xbox exclusive), and I know 2021 wasn’t the banner year of 2017, 2018, 2020, and (hopefully) 2022. As games journalists we live in something of a bubble when it comes to video game releases, but still, I’d rather have not seen the full list.
You can check that out here, but let me go through some of the lowlights for you. In North America, the PS5 chart was topped by NBA 2K - despite once being the best sports sim on the market, a further focus on off the court nonsense has seen it rapidly decline. Madden, which has been stagnating for years, takes the number four spot.
Related: Everyone's Priorities Are Wrong With The Cyberpunk 2077 DLCThe enduring popularity of sports titles is nothing new, and it’s not inherently bad. MLB The Show, quietly a much better sim than both Madden and NBA these days, takes a spot in eighth. Despite lower sales than forecast, Call of Duty Vanguard still took second, and despite being altogether terrible, Battlefield 2042 took fifth. Black Ops Cold War even had the staying power to hit seventh.
Bringing up the rear were Resident Evil Village and Far Cry 6 - even in a year as lacklustre as 2021, they felt like two of the weaker triple-A titles. Deathloop, It Takes Two, Returnal, Hitman 3, and Guardians of the Galaxy, which all take bigger risks and stick the landing, miss out completely.
It’s not all doom and gloom - the excellent Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which launched in late 2020, is all the way up in third (likely because people were waiting for PS5s to become available), and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, one
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