It turns out that making a fun game first and foremost over a politically-leaning game will actually net you some big sales. How big? Eight million copies big. Bluehole Studio’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has managed to become the biggest and best selling single-platform game of 2017.
Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad posted the news via his Twitter account.
Fun Fact:
PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS is 2017’s best selling game on any single platform. pic.twitter.com/K8KAXzo17p
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) August 27, 2017
This news comes on the recent heels of Bluehole announcing that Microsoft would be publishing the game on the Xbox home consoles this fall when it enters into the Game Preview program…
“[…] the first standalone Battle Royale game with more than eight million units sold on Steam, will be published by Microsoft on Xbox One. Through this partnership, Microsoft will help accelerate console development and maintain quality across all platforms.”
Yes, that’s right… PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds not only surpassed Dota 2 as the most played game on Steam, but it wiped the floor with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which topped out at around 3.92 million SKUs moved, as reported by Metro. It also soundly stomped Guerrilla Games’ progressive-oriented Horizon: Zero Dawn, which moved 2 million SKUs out of the gate but then tapered off quickly, fading out of the NPD’s top 10 charts early on.
Interestingly enough, it was SuperData who first estimated that Horizon would move 8 million SKUs throughout the fiscal year as reported by GameRant, but it’s a long ways off from the 8 million mark.
BioWare and EA’s Mass Effect: Andromeda could have sold that many copies during its peak on the market, but putting political ideologies ahead of solid game design and strong storytelling corked any chance of the game selling as strongly as previous entries in the series, much less selling as well as games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands or Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
What’s more is that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds managed to beat out a bunch of other AAA games that came out this year, like For Honor, which only managed 700,000 during its launch month across three platforms, as reported by PlayStation Lifestyle.
The big question is if publishers will see a game like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and focus more on making a solid, fun game instead of putting sociopolitical propaganda at the forefront of the game’s marketing appeal?
(Main image courtesy of OptiM)
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