FromSoftware’s multiplayer Elden Ring spin-off has been a major hit, as Star Wars Battlefront 2 continues to see a resurgence in interest.
One of the great difficulties of following the video games industry is working out whether individual games have been a hit or not. Especially in Europe, there’s almost no timely public data and while Japan lays everything bare the US info is all based around monthly charts – which isn’t nearly as useful as weekly would be.
A lot of the time you have to rely on secondary information, like Steam charts and console store information, but now we know for a fact that multiplayer spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign has been a major hit, despite earning a far less favourable critical reception than its parent title.
At the same time Doom: The Dark Ages, which previously had shown little sign of being a major success, was the second-best seller. Although it’s a $70/£70 game, whereas Nightreign is $40/£35.
Apart from being monthly, the other problem with the charts is that there’s no indication of how much any of the games have sold. May is not traditionally a busy time for game sales, so the general answer is probably not very much. Although, at the beginning of last month Bandai Namco indicated Nightreign had 3.5 million players.
That’s not quite the same as the number of sales and Doom’s claim of 3 million players in its first week is even less helpful, as that includes Game Pass subscribers.
Nevertheless, Nightreign has been in the bottom end of the Steam top 20 ever since its release in late May, so it’s been consistently popular ever since launch. It’s also now the 11th best-selling game of the year in the US, behind Civilization 7.
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That level of success will no doubt encourage developer FromSoftware when it comes to Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods, which is also multiplayer-focused.
The other new releases of the month were F1 25 at number 15 and Capcom Fighting Collection 2 at number 19, which without any further evidence we’re going to take as proof that Power Stone is in fact a very popular franchise that Capcom would be fools not to make more of.
However, perhaps the most interesting news of the month is that 2017 multiplayer title Star Wars: Battlefront 2 jumped from 135 in the top sellers list to number 12, and got as high as number five in terms of PC sales alone.
There’s no obvious reason for the game’s sudden, but not unwarranted, popularity, which has already led many – including one of the actors from Andor – to call for a new sequel.
In terms of hardware sales, they were overall down 13% on 2024, with Switch down 44%, Xbox Series X/S down 30%, and PlayStation 5 up 3%. Obviously, the PlayStation 5 was the biggest seller, but despite being only a month away from being replaced by the Switch 2, the Switch 1 still managed to outsell the ailing Xbox Series X/S.
Interestingly, analyst Mat Piscatella notes that spending on video game subscriptions reached an all-time high in May of $600,000,000 (£442 million) and the third consecutive month of growth. Although there’s no indication of how that breaks down between PS Plus, Game Pass, and others.
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