Which Xbox games have sold over 100K copies on PlayStation?
There’s a lot of talk about Xbox exclusivity right now. So, we use our estimates to give you an idea of how many copies – and how much revenue – Xbox is shifting on Sony’s platform.
In a recent open letter, new Xbox boss Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty wrote, ‘’We will reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI, and share more as we learn and decide.’’
Seems like a great time to dive into our data on the highest-performing Xbox games on PlayStation. Let’s look at the games that sold over 100K – day-one releases and after-the-fact ports.
This analysis doesn’t include Call of Duty. We’ve also excluded titles from acquired studios that were released on PlayStation before Microsoft’s ownership, as well as legacy contractual obligations like Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo.
Let’s have a look.
Forza, Sea of Thieves, and Oblivion Remastered take the top spots
Thirteen first-party Xbox titles have now cleared the 100K unit milestone on PlayStation. Collectively, they’ve generated $667M in gross revenue for Microsoft, as per our estimates.
Forza Horizon 5, which launched on PS5 last year, three-and-a-half years after the Xbox/PC versions, accounts for almost half of those revenues. That’s $323M via 5.8M copies sold:
While there’s a novelty to Forza Horizon on PS5, an audience largely lacking an arcadey racer, the imminent Forza Horizon 6 is on track to sell gangbusters on PS5 when it launches later this year. The Steam version, launching next month – day in date with Xbox – has now pre-sold 700K copies.
Sea of Thieves is also doing well on PlayStation. As one of the first titles in the initial porting strategy, it has moved 2.7M copies on the platform and generated nearly $100M there.
Again, while the initial sales spike was partially driven by the novelty of a high-profile Xbox exclusive first hitting rival hardware, Sea of Thieves has shown impressive long-term retention, bringing in 300K monthly active users (MAUs) on PS5. The live-service loop has integrated well into the PlayStation’s ecosystem.
Oblivion Remastered has moved 1.2M units on PS5, about $58M in gross revenue, benefitting from a day-one multi-platform release. Our data indicates that approximately 75% of this audience previously played the PS4 or PS5 version of Skyrim.
While the original Oblivion was a defining title for the Xbox 360 (it was pretty much the lead platform), the migration of console gamers from Xbox 360 to PS4, due to the disastrous Xbox One launch in 2013, boosted the addressable market for this remake on PS5. Given the enduring commercial footprint of Skyrim, plenty of players likely wanted to see what came before, too.
Grounded, Gears, Doom, and Indy also clear half a mil
Grounded has moved 770K units on PlayStation 5, generating nearly $24M in revenue. Two years after its arrival on the platform, the title continues to sustain a monthly active user base of approximately 75K. Our crossover data shows that 30% of these players also purchased Sea of Thieves, indicating that a specific segment of the PlayStation audience was responsible for the initial wave of adoption for Xbox ports.
While the novelty of the platform shift drove early interest, Grounded’s consistent monthly engagement suggests the game has successfully carved out a niche within the survival genre on Sony’s hardware.
Gears of War Reloaded has sold 684K copies on PlayStation 5 since its day-and-date launch last summer. It has outperformed Grounded in revenue due to a higher price point and higher year-one sales velocity.
However, current data suggests that momentum has largely stalled. While periodic discounts from $40 to $20 provide temporary sales spikes, the impact of these price drops is diminishing. With sales figures beginning to plateau, a more aggressive $15 price point may be necessary to capture the remaining price-sensitive audience.
DOOM: The Dark Ages has reached 567K units on PlayStation 5 since its day-and-date launch last year, generating $39M in revenue. While these figures are decent, the primary audience remains on PC, where copies on Steam are approaching 1M.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has moved 537K units on PlayStation 5, generating $37M in revenue roughly one year after its launch. Released on Sony’s hardware just four months after its Xbox debut, the title has already outsold its Steam counterpart.
This performance indicates a strong product-market fit for the PlayStation audience, which traditionally indexes higher for prestige, single-player adventure titles. Engagement data supports this: 40% of PS5 players have exceeded 20 hours of playtime, compared to 35% on Steam and just 20% on Xbox.
The lower engagement on Xbox is a clear byproduct of the Game Pass effect, where low-barrier access often leads to higher churn.
Ninjas, planes, and real-time strategy
Meanwhile, Ninja Gaiden 4 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 have both surpassed 250K units on PS5, with each title nearing $20M in PS5 gross revenue, while Starfield sales have continued to trickle in after its tepid PS5 launch a couple of weeks back, now passing 200K.
Two real-time-strategy ports, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition (173K units, $6.5M) and Age of Mythology: Retold (123K units, $3.5M), show a niche demand for the RTS genre on PlayStation. For context, Sid Meier’s Civilization VII has reached 200K units on the same hardware.
Taken together, the pattern across all these games is market fit, not uniform success or failure. PlayStation gamers flock to some of these games and avoid others. Microsoft’s spreadsheet already knows which is which.
On that open letter
These numbers also tell a clearer story than the “We Are Xbox” manifesto from Sharma and Booty. Plenty of Xbox games have a demonstrated audience on Sony’s platform. While it differs by game, the PlayStation audience is engaged, spending, and in some cases, a better fit than the Xbox and Steam counterparts.
This makes the vague language around exclusivity in the Sharma/Booty letter harder to read as uncertainty. It may simply be deliberate ambiguity while the company’s strategy shifts.
In other words, the open letter from Sharma and Booty is corporate rebranding designed to soothe a fractured base. ‘’Reducing’’ Game Pass prices to a higher price than the pre-CoD price while preaching about affordability is a tough circle to square.
Recolouring a logo and renaming Microsoft Gaming back to something everyone already called it (Xbox) is low-cost signalling. While Xbox is successfully pacifying a restless core audience with nostalgia, the actual business model is still shifting under fans’ feet.
Talk is cheap, and leadership has yet to align its spending with its rhetoric. It might eventually, and strategic shifts are inevitable, but as noted in previous newsletters, this feels like a temporary appeasement strategy for the Xbox core. Optics.
The long game is likely still a migration of the base toward Windows via Project Helix, consolidating console and PC efforts to chase that ever-fleeting DAU north star, alongside mobile and cloud efforts.
If your north star is daily active players, pricing structures that price out casual/lapsed players work against that metric directly – as does exclusivity that blocks over 132M active players.
Expect more tactical tweaks to exclusivity in the short term. Some titles will likely remain Xbox-first or Xbox-only, but if the data is any guide, they’ll be the ones a sliver of the PlayStation audience would have bought anyway. Many of these games have sold fewer than 300K on a 132M-player platform. Very few people are losing sleep over that exclusivity call.
That said, there is a messier possibility – and arguably the more damning one: that Xbox leadership genuinely doesn’t know, and this letter represents real strategic uncertainty dressed in confident language.
As a fan of games, Xbox, and competition, I sincerely hope Xbox manages to turn the tide of its challenging few years. They’re saying a lot of the right things right now. Time will tell if they put words into action.
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