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With costs rising, Oddworld Inhabitants was looking for extra financial help. Sony offered the studio a deal to put Oddworld: Soulstorm on PS Plus as a free game for one month in exchange for an undisclosed fixed sum of money. At this point, the game was due to come out in January 2021 when supply issues would have meant there weren’t many PS5 consoles in the hands of gamers. As studio head Lorne Lanning told Xbox Expansion Pass, the developer estimated they would sell a maximum of 100,000 units at launch, although 50,000 was a more probable number. The money they would receive from the deal was more than they would make through those sales.
The problems started soon after the deal was signed. The Covid-19 pandemic forced the studio to work from home and this delayed the game to a new release date in April 2021. This also gave three extra months for PS5 consoles to enter the market, therefore more players owned them than previously estimated. The result was Oddworld: Soulstorm became the most downloaded game on the PS5 at close to 4 million copies, pretty much all for free through PS Plus, something that was “devastating” for the studio. Lanning didn’t detail how this affected future sales of the game on other platforms like Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, but it is sure to have had some impact.
The 112,000 games consoles sold in the UK last month is a rise of 21% over February. However, so far this year console sales are down 46%, driven by continued stock shortages for PlayStation and Xbox devices.
Xbox Series X and S saw the biggest increase in sales during March, up 61% compared with February. Microsoft's family of consoles were the best-selling devices in March, which was helped by the arrival of more Series X stock.
Nintendo Switch sales fell 21% month-on-month but it is still the second best-selling console for March. The Nintendo platform remains the No.1 selling games machine of the year so far.
PS5 is still in third place as the console continues to suffer from shortages. However, Sony's latest machine did see a 45% rise in stock compared with the month before.
ELDEN RING, GT7 AND WWE ENJOY BIG SALES
2.77 million games were sold in the UK last month, a minor rise of 0.6% over March 2021, according to GSD.
Downloads accounted for 1.94 million of those sales, which is up 9.6% over the same period in 2021. Physical sales were 835,000, which is down 15.5%.
Last month the market was driven by a handful of very big sellers. Elden Ring was comfortably No.1 for a second month in a row, driven by strong digital sales on Steam, Xbox Live and PSN.
New release Gran Turismo 7 is at No.2, and the PlayStation game did particularly well at physical retail. 45% of its sales were for the boxed version, which made GT7 the best-selling physical game of the month.
Over 73% of Gran Turismo 7's sales were for the PS5 version (with the remainder on PS4).
At No.3 is Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 5, which is up 45% in sales compared with the same period in 2021. This is because of the new PS5 and Xbox Series X and S versions of the game. The PS5 version accounted for 37% of sales, while the Xbox Series S and X edition claimed 28% share.
Other new releases in March included WWE 2K22, which reached No.5. 2K Games' wrestling franchise took a year out following the disappointing WWE 2K20, and it seems to have paid off. Sales of this new title are up over 164% compared with the first four weeks of its predecessor, which launched in October 2019.
56% of WWE 2K22's sales were on PlayStation platforms, 41% on Xbox consoles, and the remainder on PC.
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is at No.6. Also from 2K Games, the Borderlands spin-off was most popular on digital platforms, with downloads representing 76% of sales. Sales split between Xbox and PlayStation was 50/50. The PC version was sold via the Epic Game Store, and that store is not covered by these charts.
The final new release in the Top Ten is Kirby and the Forgotten Land at No.10. Kirby may have charted higher, but Nintendo doesn't share digital sales so only physical sales are counted here.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, another game that released last month, is at No.20.
For March last year, there were fewer big games -- nothing came close to the sales of Elden Ring and Gran Turismo 7 -- but there was a larger variety of strong sellers, including Call of Duty, Rainbow Six, Monster Hunter and Super Mario.
Pensa al prossimo gioco di ND pureCe l'ha davvero a morte con CP, mamma mia
Che poi non abbia rispettato le loro altissime aspettative è vero... Si stiamavano 20M in un anno (con ovviamente un price cut meno massiccio)... Ma la ripresa consistente c'è.
40 milioni per lo strigo
Il secondo è uscito su 360 ed è giocabile su One/series.Se facessero le remaster -remake dei primi due per console sarebbero molto di più Easy