The latest Marvel game from PlayStation, Insomniac’s Wolverine, has experienced a lot of ups and downs since it’s release. Reviews were good, but not quite up to Insomniac’s usual standards, and many thought it wasn’t doing well sales wise. During today’s Sony Q22026 financial report we got some official sales figures for Wolverine.
The sales report tells the same story many have been speculating since release. Marvel’s Wolverine has sold 2.4 million units in its first 50 days of being available. For most games these days, that number is pretty good, but it doesn’t hold up compared to other PlayStation releases.
Spider-Man 2, Insomniac’s last game before Wolverine, sold 2.5 million units in its first day and had gone on to sell 10 million units in just over 100 days. PlayStation’s previous big AAA release Ghost of Yotei had sold 3.3 million in its first month of being available. When comparing to these, Wolverine is lagging behind a little bit.
However looking at the comparisons they aren’t the fairest to do either. Spider-Man is objectively a much bigger IP than Wolverine, and Ghost of Yotei was a sequel to a very popular Ghost of Tsushima which had sold north of 13 million units.
All told this likely points to Wolverine underperforming some, but not on the level some want to portray it as. With a lot of bad vibes being sent towards PlayStation with some of the decisions they’ve made, such as eliminating physical media, the platform is under more scrutiny than ever.
It will be interesting to see how Wolverine does as we head into the holiday season where PlayStation tends to do quite well.
Where Are The Sales Updates?
One thing I do find interesting in these reports from Sony of late, is that they have seemingly stopped updating us on sales figures of their catalog. We used to constantly get new data on game sales as time went on, but that appears to no longer be the case.
Games like Astro Bot, Ghost of Yotei and Helldivers 2 have only gotten an initial figure reported and we never saw another update. We haven’t heard an update on Spider-Man 2 in almost 3 years now after it topped 10 million units. In fact since that update on Spider-Man 2 we have not received any sales update for any PlayStation title, beyond the initial number they report.
It’s a bit of a stunning change for Sony as they typically gave out updates and they were quite useful. I know many aren’t fans of hearing about sales, they just want the games, but understanding how a game is doing helps fans expectations for more games in their favorite series.
We will have to see if they go back to giving updates, but for now it appears we will no longer get them.
Profits Soar As PlayStation 5 Sales Near 100 Million
In other news from today’s financial report, Sony in general is doing quite well. The company posted profits well above expectations of 3.95 billion USD. This represented a 45% profit increase on the previous quarter, in large part thanks to the new Spider-Man movie and PlayStation’s success.
Speaking of the PlayStation’s success, the PlayStation 5 has now sold 97.9 million units as it closes in on 100 million lifetime sold. Can it get there before the calendar rolls over to 2027? There’s likely a very good chance with the upcoming GTAVI expected to move significant hardware and software.
