Xbox games dominate PS5, Elden Ring Nightreign finds success, and an upcoming Chinese souls-like to watch

Forza’s HUGE PS5 success, May’s top Steam and PlayStation games, an upcoming roguelike nobody’s talking about (but should be?), and Helldivers 2’s big comeback.

Welcome back! We’re tearing ourselves away from Mario Kart World to bring you the second edition of the Alinea Insight newsletter. And it’s a big one!

Forza Horizon 5 has now sold 2.2 million on PS5, leapfrogging Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Forza Horizon 5 has been selling so well on PS5 that it’s now overtaken Assassin’s Creed Shadows by copies sold on its lead platform:

While these are two great games targeting mostly different audiences at slightly different price points, the results stood out to us.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which launched on March 20, sold relatively well initially, but copies sold on PS5 have plateaued at around 1.8 million since launch.

Meanwhile, Forza Horizon 5’s sales have so far shown a longer tail on PlayStation 5, thanks to its cheaper price point ($60 then $48 vs Shadows’ $70) and previously unfulfilled demand for open-world arcadey racers on PlayStation

As a result, Forza outsold Assassin’s Creed Shadows on May 15, just under three weeks after Forza launched on PS5

This underlines two things:

1. Xbox’s transition to a third-party publisher is a smart one – returning more on investment than its plateauing subscription strategy.

2. And it’s really time for Ubisoft to discount Assassin’s Creed Shadows below $70 to attract more players to this fantastic game.

Read more right here.

One to watch: Is WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers China’s next $100M+ premium souls-like?

The monumental success of Black Myth Wukong last year (25M+ copies sold and revenues over a billion dollars) proved that Chinese developers are no longer just making great free-to-play and mobile games.

Single-player, narrative-driven experiences on PC and console are becoming more popular in China – especially if they tell stories that resonate in the Chinese market.

Black Myth did just that, and China’s players mobilised in their millions. 58% of Black Myth’s 14.9 million copies sold on Steam were in China, while 42% of PS5’s 6.3 million came from the Chinese market.

And Game Science did it on a $42 million dev budget to boot!

When the world’s largest gaming audience shifts, the industry takes notice. Now, there’s another Chinese-made rogue-like on the horizon, WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers, whose pre-sale metrics are looking good so far:

Our CEO, Rickard Linder, wrote a JUICY data deep dive on the game. Here’s a sneak peek:

• After an Xbox Partner Preview in October 2024, WUCHANG quickly went viral in China. Its trailer racked up over 7 million views on Bilibili in days and now has 17,000 comments and 385,000 likes.

• And this wasn’t just surface-level hype; it drove real engagement, contributing to 80,000+ Steam followers shortly after the announcement at the time.

• After the Partner Preview event, momentum surged again, with more than 40,000 new followers gained, growth that outpaces most titles on its own.

• With over 120,000 followers in total, WUCHANG is the 16th most-followed upcoming Steam game – and the #3 for games with confirmed release dates.

While the majority of this interest is coming from China, Black Myth previously showed that hits in China can spill over into Western countries (and beyond), especially in this genre.

Alinea data shows that souls-like games with a dark fantasy theme generate Steam revenues of well over $20 million every month (it took me all of five seconds to find this info in the Alinea platform):

The moral of the story: don’t sleep on Chinese data on Steam/console if you want an accurate view of the market. If your current data provider only offers data on cherry-picked Western markets, you’re missing out.

Read Rickard’s full WUCHANG deep dive here for more pre-sales metrics, forecasts, souls-like TAM data, and more WUCHANG data.

Elden Ring Nightreign sells 3.5M+ copies as FromSoftware prepares for its future

Speaking of rogue-likes, let’s dive into Elden Ring Nightreign’s launch. Despite being available for just ONE DAY in May, Nightreign was #2 on both our PlayStation and Steam May top 10s by copies sold (more on those later 👀)

To date, FromSoftware’s standalone PvE Elden Ring spinoff has now sold over 3.5 million copies across all platforms, including almost a million on PS5 and 1.8 million on Steam.

Of course, its launch success should come as no surprise to subscribers like yourself, as we flagged Nightreign as one to watch (based on our prelaunch metrics) in the first edition of the newsletter.

Nightreign, which was created in just a few years and reuses assets from the original title, is a masterclass in efficient game design.

💰BONUS: Nightreign was Steam’s top-grossing new game in May💰

Taking advantage of the astronomical Elden Ring brand (30M copies sold and counting for the original) clearly paid off, as 85% of Elden Ring Nightreign players on PlayStation and 80% on Steam played the original Elden Ring first.

FromSoftware’s iconic president, Hidetaka Miyazaki, is setting his ducks in a row to train the studio’s future leaders. Nightreign marks Junya Ishizaki's directorial debut, after years of working on Souls games.

‘’You have to find the right project to allow for failure: whether it’s smaller in scope or scale, or it’s a small module within something bigger, there needs to be room for that,’’ Miyazaki told the Guardian last year.

👏 Ishizaki has a strong directorial future at From, we reckon. 👏

May 2025’s top Steam games by copies sold

As we covered right here, indies, content updates, and strong launches from Nightreign and FANTASY LIFE were the talk of the town for the Steam ranking:

• R.E.P.O (#1) sold 1.7 million copies on Steam in May. It also took the #1 spot in March but was leapfrogged by Schedule 1 in April (more on Schedule 1 in a bit!). To date, R.E.P.O has sold 14.4 million copies on Steam overall, generating revenues of over $114 million. Over a quarter of the game’s players are in the US – its top market, followed by Russia (almost 9%).

• Elden Ring Nightreign (#2) managed to sell 1.2 million copies on Steam and gross revenues of $48.5 million in May. It’s still sitting on 2.5 million Steam wishlists, so expect even more copies to shift when discounts hit.

• Expedition 33 (#3) actually sold more copies on Steam in May (another million!) than it did in its launch month (April). It’s now sold a total of 1.8 million copies on Steam, grossing revenues of almost $70 million. The US and Japan account for just under half of players, but France – the developer's home – is #3.

• Schedule 1 (#4) sold just shy of a million copies in May, bringing its total to 8.2 million (revenues exceeding $126 million). The drug-dealing sim’s DAUs are still dropping, but it still draws in 160K people a day, down from a peak of 1.7 million at the beginning of April.

• Oblivion Remastered (#5) sold another 585K copies on Steam in May, helping the classic RPG remake cross the coveted 2-million-sold mark on the platform (and $84 million in revenues overall). A price drop from $50 to $40 at the end of the month helped Oblivion stay in the top 5.

• Helldivers 2 (#6) sold another 537K copies – the most it’s sold on the platform since April 2024, thanks to a new expansion, the game’s biggest update to date, and a price drop to $32 (from $40) a few days after the expansion launch. It’s sold 11.7 million copies overall (revenues of $370 million) on Steam alone.

In fact, Helldivers 2 saw Steam MAUs of 3.7 million in May, its highest since May 2024. But what about DAUs? Well, the Alinea platform has that too.

The chart below shows a time series for Helldivers 2’s Steam DAUs since launch, with the yellow line charting the game’s intermittent price drops to $32:

As you can see, the free Heart of Democracy update period was the biggest driver of DAUs, helping Helldivers 2 hit surpass a million DAUs on May 29 – for the first time in over a year. The price drop also contributed, but – as you can see above – similar week-long price drops to $32 in the past had an impact on sales, but not this much.

The data clearly shows that price is a significant lever for this title, maximized when coupled with compelling new reasons to play.

And with nearly 5 million wishlists on Steam, it’s just a matter of time before Arrowhead discounts Helldivers 2 below $30 – or even $20, eventually – to attract even more players to their hit.

Read the full Steam top 10 right here.

May 2025’s top PlayStation games by copies sold

Xbox games again dominated the PlayStation ranking, but sports and some familiar classics also ranked:

• Forza Horizon 5 (#1) sold 1.3 million copies in May, landing it the top spot. Huge Minecraft copies sold in April – due to hype from A Minecraft Movie – saw Forza Horizon 5 debuting at #2 in the April ranking, but the tables turned last month.

• Elden Ring Nightreign (#2) sold 752K copies on PlayStation in May. The US and Japan account for over half of Nightreign’s PlayStation players (38% for the US and 13% for Japan).

• EA Sports FC 25 (#3) sold another 729K copies on PlayStation in May, bringing its total on the platform to over 18 million. Following underperforming revenues, EA slashed FC 25’s price to $13.99. It is hoping to acquire users and monetise them via Ultimate Team, which just launched a paid battle pass. Plenty of prospects are still up for grabs, as 61% of FC 24 players on PlayStation haven’t played FC 25.

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (#4) sold an additional 614K copies on PlayStation in May, bringing its PS5 total to over a million sold. Expedition 33’s word of mouth – thanks to its modern take on classic turn-based RPGs – is continuing in full force. Anime sells, make no mistake. But it turns out that there’s also a market for less-weeby turn-based RPGs, alongside the anime JRPG hits.

• Minecraft (#5) – a game that just won’t stop selling (350M+ copies sold overall!) – rounded off the top 5. It sold another 491K copies on PlayStation in May, thanks to promotional inertia from A Minecraft Movie.

Together, the four XBOX titles (Forza, Minecraft, DOOM, and Oblivion) accounted for 44% of the copies sold in PLAYSTATION’s May top 10. Wild times!

While Xbox’s subscription strategy is starting to show signs of slowing down, its inorganic acquisitions and shift to a third-party publisher are certainly paying off.

Get a full analysis of the PlayStation top 10, with loads more data.

Other insights, links, and cool stuff

• We recorded a podcast with our friends at Deconstructor of Fun, which you can watch above. Michail and Rhys dissect the current and future state of gaming, including the case for shorter games, the zero-sum nature of live services, game dev auteurs, multi-game subscription challenges, and loads more.

• We also chatted to the VGIM’s George Osborn (not the British politician!) about what to expect from the Switch 2 launch.

• Our Switch 2 analysis will also be featured in ex-IGN editor Kat Bailey’s new newsletter, the amazingly named Nintenkats, so keep an eye out for that too.

• We’re CHUFFED (that’s Welsh slang for happy) to announce that we’ve added a new Markets tab to the Alinea platform, allowing clients to filter our data by individual genres, subgenres, and – well – anything.

Below is a screenshot showing the Steam data filtered by dark fantasy souls-like games, which we discussed earlier. You can slice and dice by almost any genre/theme you can think of:

See it in action for yourself – request your free trial here, or reply to this email!

What the Alinea team is playing right now

• Linus: Victoria 3 (‘’I'm excited for the upcoming DLC, which comes out in about two weeks, so that’ll be my answer for the foreseeable future’’ ). Nice, I’ll copy and paste this for the foreseeable future.

• Marcus (and Rhys): Mario Kart World on Switch 2 (‘’We swear we’re working REALLY hard today, Rickard. We swear…’’)

• Rickard: Rickard’s gaming time has been split between Peppa Pig (‘’Dad life’’) and FC 25 (‘’Lad life’’), but he’s been eyeing some strategy games too (‘’Strad life’’ – okay that one was a reach)

• Viktor: Roblox (‘’I’ve been debugging my brother’s Roblox game, Zombie Zapper. Proud big bro over here!’’)

The last word

The newsletter is still new, so we’d LOVE some feedback and suggestions for games, trends, or games industry topics you want covered in upcoming newsletters.

Reply to this email – or reach out here – and we’ll see what we can do! Who knows? Maybe we’ll give you a free trial for the Alinea platform 😉.

[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]