How are recent PlayStation Studios games selling?
We dig into our PS5 copies and revenue estimates for PlayStation Studios' past year of releases, from Ghost of Yotei to God of War Sons of Sparta.
We’ve spent a chunk of the last few weeks looking at new and upcoming releases, including off the back of an excellent Summer Game Fest.
So, let’s look back instead. Plenty of you have asked us to dig into how PlayStation’s recent exclusives are doing on the home platform, so we’ve pulled our estimates for six PlayStation Studios titles from the past year:
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, a second-party title from Kojima Productions, which launched June 26 2025 to critical acclaim but middling sales (relatively speaking, of course).
Ghost of Yotei, Sucker Punch’s open-world samurai sequel, launched 2 October 2025. Spoilers: it’s selling very well.
God of War Sons of Sparta, a Metroidvania spin-off that shadow-dropped on February 12, following a State of Play.
Marathon, Bungie’s extraction shooter, launched March 5.
MLB The Show 26, the latest in the long-running baseball sim, launched March 17.
Saros, Housemarque’s 3D bullet-hell roguelite, launched April 30.
Let’s see how they’re selling on PlayStation.
Ghost of Yotei leads with almost 5M sold
Ghost of Yotei has been a resounding success for PlayStation since launching back in October. It’s amassed 4.8M copies sold, generated almost $350M in revenue, and is still selling.
For the past fortnight (let’s reclaim that word!), Yotei has had its first PlayStation Store discount (down 29% to $49.69), and we’ve seen a clear bump since. In those two weeks, it shifted an extra 250K copies.
Players are sinking their teeth in, too. Average playtime is 47.7 hours (median 45.5), and around 7% of players have logged more than 100 hours. Fair play.
Yotei has sold more copies on PS5 alone than Assassin’s Creed Shadows has across PS5 and Steam combined, and Shadows has been on sale since March 2025, more than six months longer. More striking still, Yotei’s PS5 gross revenue via copies sold is closing in on Shadows’ revenue via copies across PS5, Xbox, and Steam:
As you can see, Yotei sits near $350M on PlayStation alone, while Shadows is at about $370M across PS5, Xbox, and Steam.
And because PlayStation doesn’t pay a platform cut on its own storefront, the net picture is that Yotei has almost certainly generated more net revenue for PlayStation, on a single platform, than Shadows has for Ubisoft across three.
So yes, for its giant tentpole releases, PlayStation’s prestige single-player strategy is still holding up. It’s pretty cut and dry for the proper blockbusters in proven IP.
The next test will be September’s Wolverine. We’ll be covering that when the time comes, so subscribe below to get that in your inbox.
Death Stranding 2 crawls toward 2M on PS5, with a Steam-shaped nudge
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach has now sold 1.7M copies on PS5, amounting to gross revenue of $116M. Decent result, but you’ve got to imagine Sony and Kojima wanted a bit more.
As a second-party title, DS2 and its ilk will probably play by different porting rules to Sony’s wholly owned single-player franchises. The port of Death Stranding 2 arrived on 19 March 2026, nine months after PS5. It’s added almost 600K copies ($35M), bringing DS2 to 2.3M sold and $150M overall.
Revenue per copy is far lower on Steam, thanks to regional pricing. A lot of those extra sales come from China, which is comfortably DS2‘s biggest Steam market at 42% of copies sold. The game runs the equivalent of $44 there, 37% below the US price.
A wrinkle is that two weeks after the Steam port, DS2 sold 70K copies on PS5, its best two-week stretch since launch on Sony’s platform.
There was a concurrent price drop to $50, but this was the third time it had hit that price, so the cross-platform marketing was doing work of its own.
We saw the same effect with Stellar Blade on PS5 last year when its Steam version landed, and there, no discount was involved at all:
This underlines a negative point of Sony’s reported withdrawal from porting single-player games to Steam, as China is a top market for Stellar Blade on Steam as well.
As PlayStation steps back from Steam ports for single-player games to make its own box and ecosystem more valuable, it’s simultaneously walking away from the one storefront that opens the Chinese market.
The option between adding value to the box and growing in China more quickly is a tough one for PlayStation, but it might be able to have it both ways with its second-party offerings.
A mixed bag rounds out the list
MLB The Show 26 has sold 745K on PS5, generating over $50M, with almost 95% of its audience in North America. This is a casual- and sports-leaning crowd, and a distinct one. Of those who played MLB The Show 26 on PS5 in May:
34% also played NBA 2K26 in May.
20% played Fortnite.
15% Madden 26.
15% played Roblox.
13% played FC 26.
12% played College Football 26
Those were MLB’s top games by audience crossover on PS5 that month, a completely different player from the Yotei, DS2, and Saros audience.
Over 30% of MLB players have logged 100-plus hours, and the game has held PS5 daily actives of around 500K since launch. So it’s sticky with high engagement, but MLB The Show 26 is selling slower on PS5 than last year’s edition, which had moved roughly 1.2M copies by this point.
Whether that’s because Americans are eyeing up the FIFA World Cup or something else remains to be seen. Either way, a loyal base that’s quietly shrinking is worth watching (unlike baseball, in my humble Welsh opinion).
As for the rest of the list:
Saros has sold 406K on PS5, generating $30M. It’s a fantastic game with a committed niche audience (including myself!) But if Saros doesn’t get a PC port, it likely won’t break even. Sony will eventually claw back revenue and value through PS Store discounts and an inevitable PS Plus stint, but if revenue was the priority here, this banger of a game hasn’t succeeded. The Steam-port question we raised with DS2 hangs over this one, with perhaps more at stake given recent studio closures at PlayStation.
Marathon has now sold 347K on PS5, with around 75K of those arriving after the free week timed to the Season 2 launch. That’s a decent sign, but the not enough the move the needle. Of those who played Marathon on PS5 this month, almost 12% also played Destiny 2 on PS5, no surprise given Bungie dropped Destiny 2’s final content update two days ago. We’ve got a bigger Bungie/Marathon/Destiny piece coming next week, so hit subscribe below to catch it.
God of War Sons of Sparta has sold 132K copies for almost $4M. That’s a decent result for a shadow-dropped Metroidvania spin-off that mostly underwhelmed critics but has earned a small band of defenders. Most Sons of Sparta players have, predictably, played 2018’s God of War and Ragnarök, but the PS5 hardcore showed up here in a telling way. About 15% of Sons of Sparta players have also played Saros, more than have played Silksong (13%) or Animal Well (9%). In other words, this converted PlayStation and God of War fans more than Metroidvania fans.
The last point is a useful reminder that big brands can sell even niche genres. On that note, next up for Sony is Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls and Wolverine. As always, we’ll be covering them here on the newsletter at launch. Hit subscribe below to get those insights as soon as they’re ready.
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