Resident Evil Requiem is a behemoth. It’s just passed $500M (@alineaanalytics estimates). Revenue-wise, it’s outpacing every other game in the franchise and will certainly leapfrog the Resident Evil 4 remake’s $600M+ when all is said and done. Requiem is also another hit in Capcom’s greatest run of its 46-year history, having sold a record number of games last fiscal year and openly targeting even more this year. Part of that success is Capcom’s strategy around catalogue sales and discounting on Steam. But PlayStation remains Requiem‘s #1 platform, accounting for 48.1% of the 8.5M players (followed by Steam with 43.4%). Of the more than 4M Requiem copies on PS5, 30.8% (or 1.2M) are physical. More on the new free Substack.

The success of the Batman: Arkham games, Marvel’s Spider-Man games, and the SILLY success of Hogwarts Legacy ($1.7B+!|) makes it tempting to assume every quality transmedia project will be a monster. It won’t. Those are outliers, and they shouldn’t set the baseline. There’s only room for a finite number of those mega games, so treating these insane hits as the expectation is how you end up disappointed by a game that sold a million copies. As per @alineaanalytics estimates, 007 First Light alone accounts for over a third of the $900M+ that non-game-IP generated this year ($309.8M), and the top three take the vast majority. But the more realistic (and, I’d argue, more interesting) opportunity for many non-game IP is the middle. So that’s those experiences like Zero Company, Marvel Tokon, and the imminent Star Wars: Galactic Racer. These aren’t billion-dollar makers like the very singular Spider-Man games, nowhere near, but they don’t need to be. $50M for a turn-based tactics game or team-based fighting game in a stacked release window is a decent result, especially if it ties to a larger brand goal. These so-called transmedia games can help new studios secure projects, hand creatively bankrupt film and TV rights-holders a rev-share lifeline, and add quality to brands some had written off (something to get the fandom pumped about). Zero Company‘s story is better than every recent Star Wars thing not named Andor, and that counts for something for a brand that has had miss after miss, quality-wise. So no, games based on non-game IP are not all billion-dollar makers, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just as film and TV have their more niche media prestige things alongside the tentpoles (Lanterns next to Superman, The Penguin next to Batman), games will have their AA and more niche tiers too. The money’s real, the brand equity’s about, and the appetite is there ($900M and counting this year). It seems like we just need to recalibrate what success looks like, projections- wise (and also budgets-wise, to be fair). What I’m saying here is that not all non-game IP – and how they’re adapted – is equal. Blockbusters designed for broad-market scale and focused AA/genre titles are beasts, make no mistake. It’d be banging if every transmedia thing were a Hogwarts Legacy, don’t get me wrong. But in some cases, these things can be high-margin mid-tier releases that also help de-risk development portfolios while keeping legacy IP culturally active. Of course, it’d be abso-bloody-lutely great if a TV/movie release in a given IP could directly hit around a game in that IP (and vice-versa). But production timelines are so nebulous – especially in gaming – that it’s just too bloody hard to execute. I’m sure someone will get there in the end though, and it’ll probably be Nintendo.

Wolverine has sold through 1.9M copies (1M in pre-launch digital pre-orders), generating $130M - @alineaanalytics estimates. Of these revenues, 22.9% were physical. As always, these estimates don’t include unsold retail copies, which publishers often report in their sold-in numbers. Wolverine’s early success means it just passed Death Stranding 2‘s lifetime PS5 copies sold and revenues ($129M and 1.8M copies). And Wolverine is already the top-performing new PlayStation Studios game on PS5 this year, leapfrogging: - MLB The Show ($99M and 1.5M copies sold on PS5) - Marathon ($60M and 1.8M sold across all platforms) - Saros ($40M, 510K sold on PS5) - Marvel Tōkon ($49M and 740K sold on all platforms) Wolverine‘s top market, by a landslide, is the US, accounting for 53% of the player base, followed by the UK (7%), France (5%), and Canada (4%). Logan is Canadian, after all. So yes, Wolverine has sold well, but its commercial long tail is limited by its mixed media and streamer reception. Unlike Spider-Man, which reviewed insanely well and has stayed evergreen for years, this one’s tail will be shorter and lumpier, but still there. Wolverine will have secondary volume bumps driven by MCU X-Men marketing beats, holiday gifting, and new PS5 owners looking for high-budget graphics showcases (I’m looking at you, upgrading GTA 6 crowd). But make no mistake, Wolverine will keep moving. The backlash was fast and hard, but that discourse will sail clean over the heads of the millions of more passive, mainstream players who make up the bulk of this audience. Those folks’ll buy Wolverine for the brand, get it for Christmas, and never once open Reddit to find out they were supposed to be angry. Wolverine will keep selling, just not at Spider-Man heights. Spidey’s been evergreen. Wolverine will be more ever-yellow. I’ll see myself out... More on the new free Substack (link in bio!)

Wardogs has reached 2.2M copies sold on Steam alone, outpacing Arc Raiders (1.7M on Steam, launch aligned) and Helldivers 2 (1M) - @alineaanalytics estimates. These games kept their momentum for quite some time, and Wardogs still has a way to go, but still. Wardogs has also generated over $70M, already the #7 new 2026 Steam game by revenue. It’s also generated more revenue than Marathon has generated across ALL PLATFORMS to date. It’s another reminder that, when it comes to live-service games, community trumps budget and pedigree. This is an outstanding performance for a studio launching a shooter in 2026, especially given that Bulkhead was facing financial turmoil not even a year ago. I bet Team17 are chuffed they picked this one up. Wardogs hits the modern pricing sweet spot, sitting below the friction point of a $70 AAA release while capturing that chunky volume of players priced out of premium titles. Seven days in, and Wardogs has converted 11% of its wishlisters into buyers. About 57% of those wishlists were added in the last month, with roughly 15% from one-to-three months ago and another 15% from three-to-six months ago. Wardogs, like Arc Raiders, had a late, hot hype cycle, not a slow burn. And as we know, fresh wishlists convert far better than stale ones. Older wishlists suffer from intent decay, more likely to turn into passive bookmarks. As for what's next, Wardogs isn’t hitting console until 2028, so the first question is retention. DAUs are still climbing (peaking at 1.6M yesterday) and the team is hard at work fixing the launch issues, but PvP live-service is a zero-sum fight for attention. Call of Duty is around the corner, and GTA not far behind that (not on Steam, but still). So Wardogs‘ growth story is far from over. It’s got some maintenance hills to climb and a strong roadmap to deliver on before it can dream of reaching the heights of, say, an Arc Raiders. But make no mistake: even if it never sold another copy, Wardogs is already a huge success. It’s a $40 shooter aimed at a slightly unfashionable audience that stuck to its guns and turned out bloody great. You can’t really replicate what Bulkhead pulled off here, but they knew exactly who the game was for, priced it fairly, built the community before launch (and actually talked to them), cut the PR nonsense, were authentic (to a fault at times), and made something cool. You can’t really replicate what Bulkhead pulled off here, but they knew exactly who the game was for, priced it fairly, built the community before launch (and actually talked to them), cut the PR nonsense, were authentic (to a fault at times), and made something cool. And the community focus is continuing. Bulkhead is actively pushing incremental updates and patch notes focused heavily on reactive quality-of-life feedback. Excited to see where the team goes next. Fair play. Bigger write-up, including more wishlist conversion, review data, and player crossover, on today's free Substack.

Over the past few years, scares like Concord (cancelled, $300M+ down the drain) and softer sales from the likes of Marathon (1.8M sold), Saros (506K sold, $40M), Marvel Tokon (725K, $49M), and Lego Horizon Adventures (under 250K across Steam and PS5, $11M) seem to be making PlayStation more wary about its projects. Today, Sony lifted the press embargo on Wolverine, its big tentpole game from one of its premier studios. It’s had a lukewarm critical reception (by PlayStation prestige and Insomniac standards) – currently 78 on Metacritic, same as the Days Gone Remaster. It’ll sell well all the same, but still… Guerilla recently went back to the drawing board for the Horizon live-service game, and even the latest Naughty Dog game has been delayed several times and is reportedly a while away from completion. While Sony has had a few misses since the end of 2022, it’s also had some hits. Some @alineaanalytics estimates: - Ghost of Yotei (5.3M sold, $400M in gross revenue) - Astro Bot (4.5M, $275M revenue, and a GOTY win) - Stellar Blade (5.3M, $309M in revenue) - Spider-Man 2 ($1.3 billion across platforms) As for PS Studios titles from the past three years that made over $125M on PS5, there are seven as per our estimates (see image). We’ve also broken out the physical splits, because a lot of the reporting there – including ours tbf – has zoomed in on the copies-sold split. The disc decision was largely about margins, control, and killing the secondhand market. So let’s look at what actually matters to PlayStation here, revenue via discs. Clearly, physical is still a huge chunk of the revenue for these games. And it’s all more concentrated on the kinds of games PlayStation is built on. The prestige single-player games skew physical, with Astro Bot at 47%, Stellar Blade at 43%, DS2 at 42%, and Yotei at 38%. Helldivers 2, more live-service and online is only at 8% (although, Sony basically didn’t market the game pre-launch and printed a limited disc run, not expecting a success). But still, physical revenue is huge in the prestige single-player games Sony is getting more cautious about. A disc dollar is worth less to Sony than a digital one, as there’s the retailer cut, manufacturing and distribution. A consideration. Helldivers’ incredible performance on PS5 – almost 23M sold, $800M in revenue, and still 1M monthly players on PS – is a big part of why Sony keeps gunning for another live-service hit (preferably first-party, not second-party) to give it annual recurring revenue for when a hit-driven prestige period gets rough. Although live-service is pretty much zero-sum when it comes to PvP, so winning players can be difficult. Still, PlayStation wants these revenues. It sees how much third-party publishers rake in through FC, Fortnite, and Roblox, and on those it only takes its store cut. That’s 30%; 100% would be nicer, despite the budgetary price of admission (see: Concord…).

From a strictly financial perspective, I can understand Sony’s decision to divest from Physint . In a vacuum, anyway. PR and optics still matter. And right now, quite a bit. Death Stranding 2 has sold 2.5M copies, 1.8M on PlayStation and 700K on Steam (@alineaanalytics estimates). Across those platforms, DS2 has generated $170M. On PlayStation, about 1M of those DS2 copies were sold by the first two months (722K in June 2025 and 381K in July 2025). This – of course – is the Kojima PlayStation core. In the months after, DS2 struggled to sell over 100K, and shifted under 30K in August, with price reductions to $40 doing little to move the needle. Death Stranding 2 has made about $129M on PlayStation, with 65% of that coming in the first two months. On Steam, 550K copies sold in the first two months (80% of its Steam total). It’s had two discounts, which again did very little. Meanwhile, the original Death Stranding has sold about 5M copies at this point in its lifecycle – though it did have some deep discounts down to $20 in that window. To date, Death Stranding 1 has generated about $243M, with 71% on PlayStation, 25% on Steam, and 4% on Xbox. In other words, in the decade since Death Stranding was announced at E3 2016, the two Death Stranding games have generated about $413M in revenue for Sony across platforms – with Death Stranding 2 returning less than the first (so far). Ballpark math: word on the street is that the first Death Stranding cost about $100M to make, and the second somewhere in the $150M–$200M ballpark (longer dev cycle, COVID, and all that). Depending on marketing overhead and the opportunity cost of pulling those Guerrilla developers onto DS1, the franchise has almost certainly broken even – but not by much. That said, Death Stranding has been a real success in China via Steam (DS1 has 27% of its Steam user base in China, while DS2 has 44%). Also, Stellar Blade, another second-party PS game, has a 46% China Steam audience. So by moving away from Steam, PlayStation loses this Trojan horse into China. It would prefer to lock Chinese players into its own ecosystem – but PlayStation barely has an official foothold in China, so Steam was its way in. So while an estimated return on investment of 18% to 38% does amount to several tens of millions in margin, that’s not really a lot for a company like PlayStation – not for that kind of budget. And margins are the name of the game now. And opportunity cost is a thing. We obviously don’t know the full story, either – maybe milestones were missed, maybe Kojima was difficult to work with, maybe any number of things. But that information isn’t public, and either way, this doesn’t look great for PlayStation among core gamers. Especially right now. Wolverine is literally out this week (and isn't reviewing great), and the backlash to the death of physical has been louder than Sony would have expected. From a financial and margins perspective, the Physint divestiture makes sense. But there's more to a brand than those things, especially when the competition is willing to swoop in for some good PR. Sony missed out on FromSoftware after Demon's Souls. Could this end up being another one of those moments?

2026's top PlayStation Plus games by new players via the service (@alineaanalytics estimates) FC 26 took the top spot, with 7.8M new players via its PS+ inclusion. It was free to claim for PlayStation Plus Essential subscribers between May 6 and June 17, during which about 5M players accessed it through their subscription. Many claimed FC 26 during the window but only played later – including over 1M players between the end of the window and the World Cup final. Spider-Man 2 swings in at #2 with 4.3M, having been added to PlayStation Plus Extra’s catalogue on Feb 18. There was a huge spike of new players when it landed on PS+, then it settled to about 100K a week. Though, the recent Spider-Man movie gave it a boost (just like its copies sold). To date, Spider-Man 2 has generated about $1.3 billion across platforms. All eyes are on Wolverine‘s release next week. Grounded, an Xbox port, pulled in 3.2M new players via PlayStation Plus, thanks to monthly PS+ Essential inclusion between June 3 and July 8. Most seem to have been curious – rather than committed – players. About 42% of Grounded‘s PlayStation players have played for under an hour, and about 70% under five hours. Still, it’s sold over 850K copies on PlayStation to date, generating over $25M. If I was a betting man, I’d say the PS+ deal was likely a precursor to a Grounded 2 PS5 release. But whether that still happens under the current administration looks shaky. Big Walk, one of the rare games to actually launch straight onto PS+ as a free monthly title, got 2.8M PlayStation Plus players. That cannibalised sales on PlayStation (a little over 10K copies and under $200K in revenue). But the PlayStation leg of the co-op-only game was likely meant as marketing (and server-filler) for the Steam version. Network effects, and all that. On Steam, Big Walk has sold 1.8M copies and generated $23M. Bangin’ for a 30-ish-person dev team. Undisputed managed 2.8M players via its PlayStation Plus Essential addition between Feb 4 and March 4. This boxing game was more one for the ball-and-gun crowd. In February, when Undisputed was on PS+, its top games by crossover were Fortnite (played by 31% of Undisputed players that month), NBA 2K26 (30%), GTA 5 (26%), Roblox (24%), and FC 26 (24%). The team is hard at work on a sequel, and they have a strong base to springboard off. GTA 5 pulled in another 2.5M PS+ players this year, thanks to its ongoing presence on the Extra tier (re-added for the third time last November). As you’d expect, the period after the GTA 6 extended gameplay reveal on August 27 enjoyed a small spike of new players via PlayStation Plus. More on the Alinea Substack (free!)

By all counts, 2026 has been a bloody fantastic year for new games on Steam, with plenty more bangers to come. I've attached an image of this year's highest-grossing NEW Steam games so far (@alineaanalytics estimates). In total, these six games -- two of which being new IP -- make up a little under $1B of 2026’s Steam gross revenues so far. They account for about 6.6% of Steam's $15 billion in 2026 so far. The top 100 new 2026 games by gross revenues this year is about $2.4B, or about 15.9% of 2026’s Steam overall revenues so far. Of the new-game top 100, 63% were actually new IP, but 52.5% of the revenue ($1.25B) came from established IP. But it’s worth noting Crimson Desert, with its $203M, accounts for about 18% of all new-IP revenue in the top 100. When we take Crimson out of the analysis, the 62 new-IP games make up only about 39%. So yeah, a lot of established IP is doing the legwork, as you'd expect.

gamescom 2026 was AWESOME. Here are the event's top games by new Steam wishlists between Aug 23 and 30 (@alineaanalytics estimates). The top spot wasn't a game at all. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s upcoming expansion, Songs of the Past, nabbed #1 with 451K Steam wishlists by the end of the weekend. It debuted at Opening Night Live, and it’s the first Witcher 3 expansion in over a decade, landing next year after a full Witcher 3 remaster (free for existing owners!) arrives next month. The Witcher 3 has sold around 66M copies, and I’ll be one of those owners jumping back in to refresh myself on the core game (like there isn’t enough to play!), then play the expansion next year. This is all part of CDPR’s plan. The studio is clearly whetting everyone’s appetite for The Witcher 4 in 2028 via a classic bridge strategy. Releasing a free 4K remaster next month – followed by a proper expansion in 2027 – keeps IP top-of-mind across a huge gap between content (games-wise, anyway). It kind of echoes Capcom’s evergreen catalogue strategy. And outsourcing co-development to Fool’s Theory (a studio led by trusted Witcher 3 veterans) keeps CDPR’s internal headcount focused on The Witcher 4. Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, published by Wizards of the Coast and developed by Invoke Studios (a team of ex-Far Cry, Watch Dogs, and Splinter Cell devs), took #2. It’s due to launch in 2027, and it looks brilliant so far. It’s a dark-fantasy open world with third-person spell-slinging. It’s a very Witcher-ish aesthetic. As you might expect, 48% of Warlock’s Steam wishlisters have played Baldur’s Gate 3, and 46% have played The Witcher 3. One to watch. For sure! Ananta took #3 with 302K new wishlists. It’s an open-world game that looks like GTA and Persona had a baby. It was published by NetEase, developed by Naked Rain, and got a trailer at Opening Night Live. I got hands-on at the show, and it wears its influences openly; there’s literal web-slinging (very Spider-Man) and a LOAD of mini-games (Like a Dragon). It’s free-to-play and out in January. For Ananta, Naked Rain is taking the free-to-play, cosmetics-only route. That’s certainly a choice for a single-player open-world game. Without gacha mechanics driving high ARPU, Ananta is betting purely on top-of-funnel reach and long-term retention. This puts pressure on skin appeal when there’s no multiplayer lobby to flex in (although, co-op is reportedly coming later). Then there’s Lego Skylines (273K wishlists between Aug 23 and 30), which does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a cosy Lego twist on the city-builder genre, as shallow or as deep as you fancy (five min quick sesh or ten-hour no-lifer session; latter for me). There’s some family-friendly stuff in there like couch co-op, which is only really viable on console. Iceflake Studios, which Paradox acquired back in 2020 is developing this one. So Paradox is probably looking for a family-friendly onramp to its rad Cities: Skylines games. The overlap there is plain, with 33% of Lego Skylines wishlisters having played Cities: Skylines and 16% Skylines II. There’s no doubt plenty of parents here (and uncles, ahem) planning to indoctrinate the next gen of city-builders. I’ll definitely be playing with my youngest nephew. This one could be big and educational. I’m very curious to see more. Catch a data-packed write-up on the full list on the new free Substack (link is in my X bio).

How to Fish, ANOTHER new friendslop phenomenon, has hit 1.9M copies sold (@alineaanalytics estimates) It’s a wacky fishing-sim spin on low-fi co-op, and it’ll certainly pass 2M copies sold very soon. It hits all the right friendslop gates, being cheap ($4.95 with a 38%-off launch discount), mental, and bloody fun. It’s closing on $8M in revenue. Landfall Games (Content Warning, half of Peak) helped out the devs, Dazed Games, financially here. 53% of How to Fish players have also played Peak, while 27% played Content Warning. SyNeRgY, baby.

Phantom Blade Zero is on track for a hit launch (@alineaanalytics estimates), if it sticks the landing. In the week since pre-orders went live, it's sold 300K copies on Steam and generated $14.5M in revenue, with 10 weeks left until launch. Phantom Blade Zero also just passed 1.6M Steam wishlists, comfortably the most of any game coming out this year. Like a lot of other action game sickos in the West, I’ve been following Phantom Blade Zero since its appearance in a PlayStation Showcase back in May 2023. While that was my first exposure, the so-called Kung Fu punk action game, mixing up steampunk machinery, body modifications, and fast-AF combat, has been in the pipeline for almost a decade – and in full development since 2022. PlayStation is pushing this one hard, with a dedicated 20-minute State of Play deep dive, write-ups on the PlayStation Blog, and some PlayStation-peripheral features that are usually reserved for first-party games, like haptics, adaptive triggers, and 3D audio. In other words, Phantom Blade Zero is getting the full first-party marketing treatment. Let’s get the obvious comparison out of the way. This one is ticking a lot of the same boxes as Black Myth: Wukong. Phantom Blade Zero looks big-budget, bloody awesome looking, and is a culturally rooted Chinese action game that’s resonating with folks across the East and West alike. I had a chat with China gaming consultant @DanielOlimac earlier, and he reckons hype in China is high right now. In Dan’s words (can I call you Dan? I’m calling you Dan...), it’s “nowhere near what it was like for Black Myth: Wukong, but considerably higher than what we saw before the launch of Wuchang.” Looking at Alinea launch-aligned Steam copy estimates, Phantom Blade Zero had sold about 286K copies 70 days before launch (yesterday). It’s about 6.4x more than what Wuchang: Fallen Feathers had sold on Steam 70 days before its launch (45Kish), and about 73% of Black Myth: Wukong’s frankly mental 393Kish. Tracking in the same ballpark as Black Myth: Wukong is hell of a position to be in. Dan's boots-on-the-ground read is that Wukong was a once-in-a-generation cultural movement that basically everyone in China was exposed to, while Phantom Blade Zero is “much more a ‘gamers’ thing’, but in a big way.” Obviously, that could snowball, though. Phantom Blade Zero also – unlike most Western games without a local partner – has the official go-ahead to launch in China. It leans into the home-market appeal. Phantom Blade Zero’s action is based around authentic Chinese martial arts (with Hong Kong action legend Donnie Yen being a mo-cap performer and consultant – as well as consulting from Shaolin and other traditional schools). There’s also a bunch of cool Chinese cultural heritage in the game, including lion dances, Beijing opera, nuo masks, imperial ceremony, ink-wash art, and all that neat stuff. It’s a game that clearly will evoke a similar kind of national pride that Black Myth Wukong did. Of course, it’s ticking all the right boxes for landing well in China. Phantom Blade Zero has a Chinese dub, and is regionally priced well for China and surrounding countries. It costs $60 in the US, but the equivalent of: - $39.84 in China (-33.6% of the U.S. price) - $41.81 in Hong Kong (-30.3%) - $43.25 in Taiwan (-27.9%) More on today's free Alinea Insight Substack.

Gears of War E-Day briefly overtook Modern Warfare 4's Steam pre-orders (@alineaanalytics estimates). For the past couple of months, Modern Warfare 4 and E-Day have been shifting pre-order copies sold on Steam, and MW4 was comfortably leading for a while, until E-Day had its first beta, which ran between August 6 and 10 exclusively for those who pre-ordered. As you can see in the image I've added here, the effect the E-Day beta had on Steam copies sold was quick: - Before and during the beta, E-Day sold over 12K copies a day (versus MW4’s steadier 1.5K-ish) - E-Day then overtook MW4 on August 7 it overtook Modern Warfare 4 outright for about eight days. - But E-Day’s sales halted as soon as the beta ended, at just 2.3K more copies sold across the following week – even though there was an open beta last weekend (that beta attracted another 400K players on Xbox by the way, bringing the total across the betas to 1.6M). The takeaway here, I reckon, is that the E-Day beta was a sugar rush for those probably already wanting to buy it eventually. It just pulled those purchase forward. And the momentum ended as soon as the pre-order-only beta did. Meanwhile MW4 quickened its steady climb, thanks to a first-look trailer on 14 August (revealing that campaign mission in the beta) as well as increasing hype for its preorder-only beta. MW4 retook the lead on 16 August and detonated, adding 6K+ copies in one day on 17 August. Now that MW4’s marketing cycle is kicking off in earnest, its sales across platforms will only continue to grow. MW4’s early beta for digital pre-order folks will no doubt drive sales on Steam, which we'll be covering in an upcoming edition of the newsletter on Substack.

1.2M Xbox players (on console and Windows) checked out Gears of War: E-Day’s first beta (@alineaanalytics estimates). The audience is who you’d expect, the existing Gears faithful. Nearly 90% of beta players have previously played Gears 5, while 55% did their homework for the prequel with last year’s Gears of War: Reloaded. Most of this was via Game Pass, of course. In terms of engagement, 24.1% of the beta players played 10+ hours, 12.7% 15+ hours, and 6.5% clocked 20+ hours. This was a four-ish day beta, so the 6.5% putting in 20+ hours were playing four to five hours every day (on average, more on the weekend, obviously). Some of this was driven by beta rewards that carry over to the full game (mainly an ‘’Epic’’ character skin at level 20, and ‘’Rare’’ weapon set for stuff in the PvE Horde Siege mode). I jumped in myself and had an absolute blast. The new PvE mode is rad, the faster movement feels great (jumping in Gears feels wild), and the PvP is as bloody brilliant (and bloody and brilliant) as ever. My one gripe, as always, for PvP Gears is the roll-wall bounce-Gnasher meta. I’ve never loved the series drifting shotgun-first, and I’d dearly love a no-shotgun mode – or at least one where we don’t spawn in with an OP shotgun. I digress. On Steam, pre-order copies roughly doubled off the back of the beta, from around 50K before it to 100K after. Fence-sitters and later-buyers bit the bullet to get in, probably nudged by the strong word of mouth. Obviously, 100K Steam pre-orders with a month and a half still to go is a healthy leading indicator for launch. Missing PS5 might come back to bite Xbox on this one, though. It’s on Steam anyway, after all. Anyway, the Gears E-Day open beta kicks off today and runs until 17 August, so we’ll have more beta numbers next week. You can subscribe to our Substack (link is in my bio) to get those numbers in your inbox. And fook me, those Gears controllers are NICE.

Marvel Tokon sells 485K copies on PS5 and Steam (@alineaanalytics estimates). PS5 accounts for 74% of that split, while Steam takes 26%. It’s made $33M in revenue across those platforms. The lower Steam share tracks, with many fighting games skewing to console due to easier-to-access couch multiplayer. Marvel Tokon’s Steam launch, though, was marred by performance issues, bugs, intrusive DRM, and no Linux support (so no proper Steam Deck compatibility). Arc has been patching hard, and many issues are already fixed, but first impressions are sticky. Tokon might have sold closer to 1M if the Steam stuff hadn’t been such an issue. Word of mouth was cut short. Our estimates show that about 75% of Marvel Tokon players live in North America, with the majority, of course, in the US. This helps explain why the PS5 physical share at 15.1% – lower than usual for a new PlayStation game. US players skew more digital than most regions, and this is a heavily American audience. Captain America, indeed. The PS5 audience overlap (the shared unique players between Tokon and other games) shows the hardcore fighting-game core tapped in. The entire top 10 by crossover is fighting games, with Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves (8% crossover), Invincible VS (8%), and DNF Duel (7%) leading the way. Directional overlap with the mainstream is strong on PS5, as well: - 52% of PS5 Tokon players played Dragon Ball FighterZ - 49% Street Fighter 5 - 41% Mortal Kombat 1 - 39% Street Fighter 6 - 35% Tekken 7 Marvel fandom is helping push copies on this one. On PS5, 60% of Tokon’s PS5 players have played Spider-Man: Miles Morales, 57% Spider-Man 2, and 53% Marvel Rivals. Those numbers are higher than even the biggest fighting-game overlap (Dragon Ball FighterZ at 52%). As I covered earlier this week, Spider-Man in particular is very front of mind right now, thanks to the new movie. And Spidey is featured prominently on the artwork and trailers. Relatively speaking, fighting games are a pretty niche genre (Smash, Dragon Ball Z, and flagship franchises like Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat aside…). Even Riot couldn’t crack it, laying off around 80 people, roughly half the 2XKO team, in February due to soft player momentum. Despite being free-to-play, 2XKO has pulled in just 1M players on PS5. Meanwhile, Tokon is a paid, single-genre fighter that has done 485K in a week. One difference there (in addition to Riot fandom being mostly all PC) is the IP. Marvel is doing some lifting a niche genre can’t do on its own. That’s the bet PlayStation, Arc, and Marvel made, and – Steam wobbles aside – so far, so okay. More on the free Substack (link's in my profile there).

The new Spidey movie has given a massive lift to Spider-Man 2 on PS5 and Steam (@alineaanalytics estimates) So far, Spider-Man 2 has sold another 316K copies since Brand New Day hit cinemas on 30 July, generating $11M+ across PS5 and Steam in under two weeks. About 20% of the film-window PS5 copies were physical, and another 274K players jumped in for the first time via PlayStation Plus. In total, Spidey 2 has slung its way past 18.2M copies sold (92%+ on PS5) and over $1.2 billion (!!!) since launching nearly three years ago. This past weekend it topped 1M daily active users for the first time since launch week, roughly 2.6x its pre-film daily engagement. While some smart discounts had an impact, hype around the movie did most of the work here, as shown by the pricing data in our platform (which you can overlay on copies-sold deltas!) On PS5, Spider-Man 2 had the same $29.39 sale price during a February promotion and during this film window. The Feb sale moved ~6.3K copies a day, but the new film window is moving ~15K a day at that identical price – 2.4x on average and peaking at 4.5x on the biggest day. Steam is similar. At a flat $40.19, the film is selling 2.3x what the same $40.19 discount did back in June. This is one of the clearest transmedia halo effects we've ever measured. And it’s still an untapped opportunity. Right now, these lifts happen mostly by accident. Brand New Day landed almost three years after the game. Imagine if a platform holder or publisher managed to align a major game and a major film. If only dev timelines and delays weren’t so hellish… Movie and especially game development cycles are notoriously unpredictable, and syncing two multi-year, multi-hundred-million-dollar productions to swing in together is a logistical nightmare. But for the handful of publishers making movies AND games in the same IP, surely one of these has to line up. I'd kill to see that impact. Also, go and watch Brand New Day! Best Spidey flick since Spider-Man 2.

Here's our PlayStation copies sold ranking for July (@alineaanalytics estimates). Beyond the CoD doing ports doing GANGBUSTERS, the thing that stands out is Halo's notably slow start on PlayStation, which ironically stings even more next to the success of two effort-light CoD ports. Halo sold 351K copies on PS5 in July and 452K on PlayStation to date (almost $28M). $60 was WAY too much for this one. And for comparison, Halo has sold through 212K on Steam and around 900K on Xbox (console and PC). One can’t help wondering what could have been if Halo had kept the trajectory it had around Halo 3 and Reach. A remake of the game that started it all landing this softly on a new platform makes me pretty bloody sad, as a Halo fan. You can catch a full analysis of the ranking on Substack (link is in my bio), but the gist is that July’s PS5 chart is all about nostalgia and the catalogue. A proven, beloved old game, dropped at the right moment and, just as importantly, at the RIGHT PRICE, can out-earn almost anything new and buy a bit of breathing room in the slate. CoD got it. Halo didn’t. Sixty dollars for what’s essentially a graphical touch-up of a 2001 game was always gonna be a roughsell, and players clearly weren’t having it. Despite this being a PlayStation chart, there’s ironically some important data and lessons for Xbox’s strategy here...

Nolan's The Odyssey has given Assassin's Creed Odyseey its most engagement in years (@alineaanalytics) The Odyssey hit cinemas on 17 July, and the cultural spillover into games was pretty immediate. Players naturally connected the film’s classical Greek setting to Ubisoft’s 2018 Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Combined daily active users (DAUs) across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation sat around 122K on 17 July. By 27 July, ten days after the film opened, they hit 233K. That's a 90% surge in engagement (+110K daily players), at 1.8x the game’s pre-film July baseline. Looking at the platform split: - Steam picked up 26%. - PlayStation nearly doubled (+94% to 114K DAUs). - Xbox exploded (+134% from 36K to 84K DAUs, a 2.5x jump over its baseline). And that's a conservative floor, because our estimates cover only Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation (for now...) Subscriptions drove this spike on console, as per our estimates. Because AC Odyssey is on both Game Pass and PS Plus, many curious moviegoers faced zero financial friction to start playing. Lapsed fans jumped straight back in, while new players found a 60+ hour Greek epic waiting inside a subscription they already pay for. Software sales moved modestly at around 400K copies year-to-date, but the real here is pure player engagement. The film didn’t make millions buy an eight-year-old game, but it got a massive cohort playing it again. That data gives Ubisoft great ammunition for an eventual AC Odyssey Resynced. Credit to Ubisoft for leaning into the momentum. They ran timed social campaigns alongside Nolan’s release and resurfaced Discovery Tour (the guided, combat-free educational mode), positioning it as an interactive companion piece for anyone falling down a history rabbit hole after leaving the cinema. Well played, Ubisoft, congrats, Nolan, and unlucky, anti-woke brigade. More on the Substack!

A lot of folks still buy physical games on PlayStation (@alineaanalytics estimates), but the type of game matters there. Now that Sony has confirmed it’s taking physical discs behind the shed in 2028, its physical splits are worth a proper look. Sony knew a vocal minority of superfans would be mad, but they did it anyway for a simple reason. Margin. While I’m no fan of this decision as a consumer, the data explains the boardroom math. Here are our estimates for the physical share of copies sold across ten high-profile PlayStation titles over the past couple of years: The range is enormous, running from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth at 48.0% physical down to Black Myth: Wukong at 10.8%. That spread reveals a lot about who still gives a shite about discs: The top of the list is collector territory, the prestige single-player epics (FF7 Rebirth, Astro Bot, Spider-Man 2, Expedition 33) that we older heads want sitting on our shelves. Then, the bottom belongs to digital natives like Black Myth: Wukong (a PC-first title with a massive China audience used to digital downloads) and Madden 26 (an annual live-service game nobody keeps a box for). Most recent annual sports games land at a similar physical share. Third-party publishers are obviously chuffed behind the scenes because of the underlying unit economics. On a standard $70 first-party game, a disc sale nets Sony roughly $45 after retail’s cut and manufacturing. A digital sale keeps effectively the full $70, yielding a 54% jump per copy. Sony’s internal numbers clearly show that any unit sales lost by killing the disc drive will be far smaller than that 54% margin uplift. For third-party games, the gap is smaller but still significant: ~$35 on a disc versus ~$49 digital (a ~40% uplift). $80 base prices widen that absolute cash gap on every single converted sale. Extrapolating this across a full catalogue shows why Sony pulled the trigger. Sony wants Steam-style catalogue margins, so they are cutting an increasingly small, low-margin retail channel to force everyone into a storefront they fully control, pocketing the retail cut on every transaction. FF7 Rebirth at 48% physical means nearly half its buyers ran through the lowest-margin channel. Push even a chunk of those buyers to digital, and per-copy revenue on that group jumps by half. More on Substack!

This gen’s top remakes & remasters by copies sold across PlayStation, Steam, and Xbox (@alineaanalytics estimates) Resident Evil 4 remake sold-through a monstrous 16.8M copies across PlayStation (7.4M, 46.9%), Steam (6.8M, 42.9%), and Xbox (1.6M, 10.1%). Almost 4M of those were sold this year. It’s also among the most successful single-player horror games in history, generating $560M in gross revenue for Capcom so far across the three platforms. Ark: Survival Ascended, the late-2023 remake of 2015’s Ark: Survival Evolved, has sold 7M copies overall, the bulk on Steam (3.9M), then PlayStation (2.1M) and Xbox (1.0M). It also hit PlayStation Plus (adding 2.4M players) and Xbox Game Pass (adding 3.8M players) in 2024, less than a year after release. The Last of Us Part 1 has sold 6.3M copies, split across PS5 (55.4%) and Steam (44.6%). This is topical, given reports that Sony is dialling back single-player day-and-date PC releases, as it sharpens its focus on margins. TLOU Part 1 was the title’s first-ever PC release, whereas the PS4 remaster had been cheap and available on PlayStation for years (including via PS Plus), softening its console pickup. Oblivion Remastered has moved 4.5M paid copies (2.8M on Steam, 1.2M on PlayStation, and about 500K on Xbox). Oblivion launched day-and-date on Game Pass, where another 4.1M players accessed it across Xbox consoles and PC. These numbers position the just-announced Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters for big runs, especially if Bethesda can time them to future seasons of the Amazon show (no easy feat given always-shifting dev timelines…) 2023’s Dead Space, a BANGER remake of EA’s 2008 sci-fi horror BANGER, has sold 4.3M copies. Steam leads at 2.8M, then PS5 at 1.4M and Xbox at ~150K. Xbox’s low share is due to its EA Play inclusion (bundled into Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass), plus the fact the 2008 Xbox 360 original has been on Game Pass for nearly a decade with back-compat enhancements (Auto HDR, faster loads). Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth has sold 4.2M copies: PS5 leads with 2.9M (launched Feb 2024), Steam 1.1M (Jan 2025), Xbox under 75K (launched last month). The last instalment, Revelation, will launch simultaneously across PS5, Xbox, PC, and Switch 2. Square Enix is finally adopting Capcom’s multiplatform, wide-as-possible strategy. It’s a smart move. Their days of long PS5 exclusivity windows (leaving money on the table) are doners. Silent Hill 2, Konami’s return to form and remake of the PS2 classic, has sold through (through, folks) 3.2M copies, grossing $170M. About 57.2% of those revenues are on PlayStation, 37% on Steam, and 5.8% on Xbox (which launched a year after the initial window). Silent Hill 2 is one of the most critically revered horror games ever, and there was a lot of doubt surrounding the remake. Not anymore.Candidly, the remake has done more for the Silent Hill brand than a decade of false starts. Find more on our Substack!

Palworld has sold over 30M copies, generating $700M! (@alineaanalytics estimates) Obviously, that makes Palworld one of the biggest new gaming IPs ever, and about 86% of the copies come via Steam. - On Steam, Palworld sold nearly 1.5M additional copies since its 1.0 launch ($25M in gross revenue). - On PlayStation, the game moved roughly 300K additional copies post-1.0 (about $7M in revenue). - On Xbox, copies since 1.0 reached a little under 70K copies (about $1M in revenue), cannibalised by the Game Pass inclusion. PlayStation and Xbox yield higher gross revenue per copy sold due to geographic distribution. Steam commands a much higher market share in territories like China, where regional pricing scales the base price down ($11 in China versus $21 in the US). The 1.0 launch also brought loads of players back into the fold, pushing daily active users (DAUs) to an average of 3.7M over last weekend. Monthly active users (MAUs) are currently pacing to cross 10M this month across PC and console, as well. To many players, Palworld satisfies the open-world monster-catching fantasy that 90s kids grew up wanting, while its survival systems add systemic depth. Our 1.0 sentiment analysis indicates that despite minor optimisation bugs, player response remains overwhelmingly positive. Steam reviewers frequently highlight how the loop of monster catching, base building, and resource automation creates a sticky progression structure that sustains engagement well past the 100-hour mark. This is reflected in our playtime distribution data: - 20% of Steam owners (roughly 5.2M players) have logged over 100 hours in Palworld, while 0.7% (nearly 200K users) have logged over 500 hours. - The playtime curve on PS5 closely mirrors Steam’s profile. Xbox, however, displays a fundamentally different engagement profile due to the “try-and-ditch” dynamics of Game Pass. - Nearly 50% of Xbox players dropped the game under the 5-hour mark (compared to 12% on Steam and 23% on PlayStation), and only 8% crossed 100 hours of playtime. Find more data and analysis on the free Alinea Substack (link's on my profile!)