March 2026’s top PlayStation games
A sports titan keeps momentum at a vital time, Crimson Desert finds a big audience, and Resident Evil Requiem solidifies its successful launch.
Let’s jump straight into a new batch of Alinea Analytics estimates, looking at March’s top PlayStation games (units sold).
Resident Evil Requiem continues its huge success with $200M on PS5
Capcom’s latest horror bounced off its fantastic launch, clearing 2.8M copies sold on PS5, with a massive 1.9M in March alone. Overall, Resident Evil Requiem has now generated $200M on PS5 alone.
At launch, Requiem had sold through far more copies on Steam than on other platforms. While the number of copies sold on Steam remains higher than on PS5, Requiem has actually made more money on PlayStation.
Resident Evil Requiem has generated over $200M in gross revenue on PS5, significantly outperforming Steam’s $167M.
This difference is due to regional pricing and the different geographical distribution of Steam’s audience. Resident Evil Requiem costs $70 in the U.S., but the equivalent of $46.87 in India and $50.41 in China.
In other words, more of the PlayStation copies were sold in tier-1 markets where the $70+ price point is standard, whereas Steam’s globalised nature often drags down revenue per user there (for different price points).
Finally on RE9, the digital transition is growing for the IP on console, with roughly 75% of PlayStation sales coming via the PS Store (yes, our estimates cover that!), allowing Capcom to capture higher margins by bypassing the physical retail tax.
EA FC 26: Building the World Cup moat
EA’s footie juggernaut continues to dominate the annual sports-game cycle, with another 1.3M sold on PlayStation last month. EA FC 26 maintains a staggering 5M DAUs globally across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, but the platform preference is clear: PlayStation accounts for 80% of that daily engagement.
And the volume is crazy, as FC 26 now boasts 25M players across PlayStation, Xbox and Steam, with 70% of that via PlayStation. Also, over 2.5M players are on PS4, if you’re wondering why EA keeps releasing last-generation editions. The sheer volume of FC sales means it’s worth keeping FC on last generation but not Madden and F1.
In the final week of March, EA executed its deepest FC26 discount to date (-70% to $20.99), which is ongoing. While this follows FC25’s pricing strategy beat for beat so far, there’s another added benefit here. It spikes the player base ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
If I were EA, I’d be more aggressive with discounts ahead of the tournament. Starting to pump in those top-of-funnel players will make the in-game ecosystem (read: player wallets) ready for the FC surge during the summer tournament, which will be watched by half of the damn world population.
Some food for thought: amid Xbox’s woes and Nintendo lowering its Switch 2 forecasts, I’ve heard the typical doom and gloom around the death of consoles. Sports games like FC and NBA2K sell best on console, sell gangbusters there, and have barely made a dent on Steam.
The console-first nature of sports games also makes them a factor in Xbox’s next machine (and one of the reasons to keep the console side for now as Xbox transitions its players to PC).
Two new games and a classic round off March’s PlayStation top 5
As for the rest of the ranking:
Crimson Desert has silenced sceptics (and the stock market…), who feared a rocky critical reception would hinder potential among consumers in the long term. Crimson has already made over $200M across platforms, including almost $75M via PS5, proving that there is a massive appetite for high-fidelity, single-player-focused sandboxes. On PS5, Crimson has carved out a specific demographic of enthusiasts that less global market data misses (but we don’t). Our estimates show that 38% of PS5 Crimson Desert players have also played Dragon’s Dogma 2. This is significantly higher than the overlap with more mainstream titles like Assassin’s Creed: Shadows or Expedition 33. Weird and wonderful RPG fans, let’s go.
Minecraft sold another 830K copies on PlayStation last month. Business as usual. With well over 300M sold across platforms, Minecraft is the best-selling game in history and one of the most resilient entertainment properties on the planet. Every month, a new cohort of children reaches Minecraft age, ensuring a constant volume of new sales regardless of the wider market’s health. Like sports games, Minecraft – while also on mobile – also serves as a gateway drug for wallets opening on the PlayStation ecosystem.
MLB The Show 26 sold roughly 400K units on PS5 since its March 12 launch, generating $30M in gross revenue. While these are respectable numbers for a launch month, they highlight the vast difference between regional and global sports IP. EA FC 26, a game that has been on shelves for over half a year, generated more revenue on PlayStation in the last two weeks of March from unit sales alone than MLB did in its entire launch window. And that’s not even including the huge revenue generated via FC’s Ultimate Team mode.
The disparity here is driven by geography. While MLB’s player base is almost exclusively North American, with 96% of players located there and 92% in the US alone.
Meanwhile, FC captures a more global distribution, allowing high-volume sales long after the initial launch hype has faded. That said, MLB remains a cornerstone for part of Sony’s American business.
And that’s the PlayStation top 5 done! Stay tuned for the March Steam data in the free newsletter this Friday. Hit the button below to get that in your inbox as soon as it’s ready.
Cool links and other stuff
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Alinea press coverage:
We chatted to IGN this week about some controversial Nintendo price changes for upcoming Switch 2 games.
We also spoke to GameSpot about Switch 2 hardware and Nintendo’s potential plans there.
We were also quoted talking about Nintendo in Fast Company. What can we say: Everybody wanted to hear about Nintendo this past week!
Our Marathon estimates were picked up across the internet, including on Eurogamer, VGC, TWIV, GamesBeat, Forbes, and others.
It’s always nice to see our estimates – and coverage of them – hitting the zeitgeist and sparking discussion across the industry.
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The last word
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