Here are some revenue estimates for the past four @thegameawards GOTY winners (@alineaanalytics estimates). Elden Ring (2022 winner), Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023), Astro Bot (2024), and Expedition 33 (2025) have generated a combined $3.8B via 73M copies sold. We're publishing a deep dive on the free Substack later today.

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Resident Evil Requiem has sold 1.3M physical copies on PS5 (@alineaanalytics estimates). That's $92.3M in revenue. In other words: - About 15% of Requiem‘s revenue (all platforms) comes from PS5 discs. - That’s 30.2% of the game’s revenue on PlayStation - Physical PS5 copies of Requiem made 1.8x more revenue than all copies sold on Xbox

Gears of War: E-Day has sold 230K copies (@alineaanalytics estimates). Steam accounts for 168K of those, with Xbox (console and PC) selling 62K. But there’s more to this story, as Xbox makes up the bulk of revenue (almost three-quarters). On Xbox, Game Pass is cannibalising much of the premium revenue. Our estimates show that 1.7M folks accessed E-Day via their subscription rather than a copy. But Xbox is having it both ways – or having it halfway, at least – via its Premium Edition Game Pass upgrade. Game Pass subscribers could pay $30 (or their local equivalent) for up to five days of early access starting October 1. Our estimates show that of the 1.7M who accessed E-Day through Game Pass, 722K paid for the upgrade. Between the review embargo lifting on October 1 and the full release, E-Day managed to shift another 250K early-access upgrades – no doubt helped by the campaign’s rave reviews. So despite selling far fewer copies on Steam, Xbox accounts for almost three-quarters of the revenue (roughly $26M of the $37M, versus about $11M on Steam). So “230K copies” undersells the paying audience. Including the 722K upgrades, nearly 950K people actually paid something for E-Day. While E-Day is a sublime game (it's made my top 10), these are soft numbers for a flagship when Xbox badly needs revenue wins. E-Day sold 62K copies on Xbox against 722K Premium upgrades, so for every one copy sold on Xbox, nearly 12 Game Pass upgrades were sold. The $70 premium SKU is – functionally – dead on Xbox. In a world without day-one Game Pass, many of these folks would have bought E-Day at $70. They paid $30 for five days early access to something they don’t own. Xbox is, in effect, charging its most valuable customers the least, based on a hangover from a tried-and-exhausted strategy from a previous administration. Those 722K willing-to-pay players generated about $21.7M via the upgrade. If three quarters of this group – mostly US and European audiences – bought E-Day outright, that’s nearly $40M. Of course, Game Pass does bring in meaningful recurring revenue, and E-Day is adding value for hundreds of thousands of subscribers. However, Game Pass is no longer growing, so Xbox is at a crossroads. Normally you can’t see what a Game Pass player would have paid, because the game’s just there in the subscription. But the $30 early-access upgrade estimate shows that 722K people demonstrated they’ll spend real money on this game. Xbox is reportedly looking to do a Netflix and bolt on an ad-supported tier to pad it further. But that will just set a new floor, and leadership keeps telling us the priority now is revenue growth, which is subscriber-speak for ARPU. Xbox has already pulled Call of Duty from day-one Game Pass after day-one inclusion hammered its sales, with new CoD titles now arriving on the service around a year late. We know that some Microsoft executives believe the service devalues games outright, and rumours (which Microsoft has dismissed so far, to be fair) suggest that day-one releases could be taken off Game Pass. When a game this bloody awesome and well-reviewed does this softly on its home platform, the model – not the game – gets brought into question. Which leaves Xbox at a crossroads. Will it keep making Gears games when the financial returns are this thin and the margins this low? And if it does, does the next one arrive off Game Pass at day one – the way CoD now does, or on PlayStation? More, including player crossover and playtime distribution, on the new Substack.

Zooming in on FC 27 PlayStation data (@alineaanalytics estimates) Top countries by revenue: - France, with 14.3% of the revenue ($82.5M) - The US, with 11.9% ($68.4M) - The UK, with 10.7% ($61.3M) - Germany, with 7.5% ($43.3M) - Spain, with 4.2% ($24.1M) France tops the list – not the US – when you rank by money rather than bodies, as football-obsessed European markets are where the engaged, high-spending Premium Edition-buying FUT crowd lives. Just 8.2% of PlayStation copies were physical (501K copies accounting for $47.3M), which is lower than usual because the digital-only perks in the premium editions nudge players away from discs. 11.7% of PlayStation sold-through copies were on PS4 ($67.2M). 216K copies were sold in Brazil which, despite being an emerging market with real wealth inequality, still delivers plenty of high-spending, footie-obsessed players ready to spend. Our player crossover data also shows the typical FC 27 player is a world away from the players we usually talk about in this newsletter. They’re more casual, and they play free live-service games and other sports titles – pretty much exclusively. For example, of September’s FC 27 players on PlayStation: - 62% also played FC 26 that month, suggesting the launch cohort were hardcore FC players hopping over from FC 26 (that crossover is under 5% for October so far – well and truly moved on). - 30% played Fortnite, 20% played Roblox, and 18% played Rocket League in September, so there’s your free-to-play, kid-friendly live-service crowd. - The top new September game by crossover was Wolverine, at under 2% player crossover. So the FC 27 launch cohort is not a group that buys lots of other new AAA games. - 15% played GTA 5 and 8% played CoD in September. This is a bit of a threat for the game, to be honest. FC‘s audience doesn’t buy much else, but it overlaps heavily with the sequels about to land exclusively on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles for the first time. More on Substack!

There's a new #1 2026 game by revenue across Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam (@alineaanalytics estimates) FC 27 has now generated $714.1M in revenue since launching at the end of last month, passing Resi and Forza. Wild to think that Forza Horizon 6 would be #1 right now if it had launched on PS5 as well. Although, we've still got TakeTwo's GTA 6 and Xbox's Modern Warfare 4 to come. So the show very much ain't over yet. SO MANY GOOD GAMES. More on the new Substack.

Gears of War: E-Day has sold 120K copies on Steam for nearly $7M (@alineaanalytics estimates) It’s sold under 20K in the last six weeks despite launching this week in early access, so the pre-launch curve is soft (but it’s increasing a bit). Gears is a far more niche IP than Call of Duty (450K Steam copies pre-sold), of course. Launch-aligned, E-Day has already sold more than double what Halo: Campaign Evolved did on Steam, but it’s well behind Wardogs (which was on 567K at this point pre-launch, versus Gears‘ 120K, and roughly triple the revenue). Realistically, in this window, 1M on Steam this year for E-Day is a stretch, and most of the Xbox revenue will be eaten up by Game Pass. That said, some superfans will cough up the extra $30 to play earlier. In my view, they shouldn't have cancelled that PlayStation port. It would have added some much-needed extra revenue, the port was reportedly already in the works, and Gears isn't necessarily a console-seller anymore. I can see a port coming at some point.

Resident Evil Requiem is a behemoth. It’s just passed $500M (@alineaanalytics estimates). Revenue-wise, it’s outpacing every other game in the franchise and will certainly leapfrog the Resident Evil 4 remake’s $600M+ when all is said and done. Requiem is also another hit in Capcom’s greatest run of its 46-year history, having sold a record number of games last fiscal year and openly targeting even more this year. Part of that success is Capcom’s strategy around catalogue sales and discounting on Steam. But PlayStation remains Requiem‘s #1 platform, accounting for 48.1% of the 8.5M players (followed by Steam with 43.4%). Of the more than 4M Requiem copies on PS5, 30.8% (or 1.2M) are physical. More on the new free Substack.

The success of the Batman: Arkham games, Marvel’s Spider-Man games, and the SILLY success of Hogwarts Legacy ($1.7B+!|) makes it tempting to assume every quality transmedia project will be a monster. It won’t. Those are outliers, and they shouldn’t set the baseline. There’s only room for a finite number of those mega games, so treating these insane hits as the expectation is how you end up disappointed by a game that sold a million copies. As per @alineaanalytics estimates, 007 First Light alone accounts for over a third of the $900M+ that non-game-IP generated this year ($309.8M), and the top three take the vast majority. But the more realistic (and, I’d argue, more interesting) opportunity for many non-game IP is the middle. So that’s those experiences like Zero Company, Marvel Tokon, and the imminent Star Wars: Galactic Racer. These aren’t billion-dollar makers like the very singular Spider-Man games, nowhere near, but they don’t need to be. $50M for a turn-based tactics game or team-based fighting game in a stacked release window is a decent result, especially if it ties to a larger brand goal. These so-called transmedia games can help new studios secure projects, hand creatively bankrupt film and TV rights-holders a rev-share lifeline, and add quality to brands some had written off (something to get the fandom pumped about). Zero Company‘s story is better than every recent Star Wars thing not named Andor, and that counts for something for a brand that has had miss after miss, quality-wise. So no, games based on non-game IP are not all billion-dollar makers, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just as film and TV have their more niche media prestige things alongside the tentpoles (Lanterns next to Superman, The Penguin next to Batman), games will have their AA and more niche tiers too. The money’s real, the brand equity’s about, and the appetite is there ($900M and counting this year). It seems like we just need to recalibrate what success looks like, projections- wise (and also budgets-wise, to be fair). What I’m saying here is that not all non-game IP – and how they’re adapted – is equal. Blockbusters designed for broad-market scale and focused AA/genre titles are beasts, make no mistake. It’d be banging if every transmedia thing were a Hogwarts Legacy, don’t get me wrong. But in some cases, these things can be high-margin mid-tier releases that also help de-risk development portfolios while keeping legacy IP culturally active. Of course, it’d be abso-bloody-lutely great if a TV/movie release in a given IP could directly hit around a game in that IP (and vice-versa). But production timelines are so nebulous – especially in gaming – that it’s just too bloody hard to execute. I’m sure someone will get there in the end though, and it’ll probably be Nintendo.

Wolverine has sold through 1.9M copies (1M in pre-launch digital pre-orders), generating $130M - @alineaanalytics estimates. Of these revenues, 22.9% were physical. As always, these estimates don’t include unsold retail copies, which publishers often report in their sold-in numbers. Wolverine’s early success means it just passed Death Stranding 2‘s lifetime PS5 copies sold and revenues ($129M and 1.8M copies). And Wolverine is already the top-performing new PlayStation Studios game on PS5 this year, leapfrogging: - MLB The Show ($99M and 1.5M copies sold on PS5) - Marathon ($60M and 1.8M sold across all platforms) - Saros ($40M, 510K sold on PS5) - Marvel Tōkon ($49M and 740K sold on all platforms) Wolverine‘s top market, by a landslide, is the US, accounting for 53% of the player base, followed by the UK (7%), France (5%), and Canada (4%). Logan is Canadian, after all. So yes, Wolverine has sold well, but its commercial long tail is limited by its mixed media and streamer reception. Unlike Spider-Man, which reviewed insanely well and has stayed evergreen for years, this one’s tail will be shorter and lumpier, but still there. Wolverine will have secondary volume bumps driven by MCU X-Men marketing beats, holiday gifting, and new PS5 owners looking for high-budget graphics showcases (I’m looking at you, upgrading GTA 6 crowd). But make no mistake, Wolverine will keep moving. The backlash was fast and hard, but that discourse will sail clean over the heads of the millions of more passive, mainstream players who make up the bulk of this audience. Those folks’ll buy Wolverine for the brand, get it for Christmas, and never once open Reddit to find out they were supposed to be angry. Wolverine will keep selling, just not at Spider-Man heights. Spidey’s been evergreen. Wolverine will be more ever-yellow. I’ll see myself out... More on the new free Substack (link in bio!)

Wardogs has reached 2.2M copies sold on Steam alone, outpacing Arc Raiders (1.7M on Steam, launch aligned) and Helldivers 2 (1M) - @alineaanalytics estimates. These games kept their momentum for quite some time, and Wardogs still has a way to go, but still. Wardogs has also generated over $70M, already the #7 new 2026 Steam game by revenue. It’s also generated more revenue than Marathon has generated across ALL PLATFORMS to date. It’s another reminder that, when it comes to live-service games, community trumps budget and pedigree. This is an outstanding performance for a studio launching a shooter in 2026, especially given that Bulkhead was facing financial turmoil not even a year ago. I bet Team17 are chuffed they picked this one up. Wardogs hits the modern pricing sweet spot, sitting below the friction point of a $70 AAA release while capturing that chunky volume of players priced out of premium titles. Seven days in, and Wardogs has converted 11% of its wishlisters into buyers. About 57% of those wishlists were added in the last month, with roughly 15% from one-to-three months ago and another 15% from three-to-six months ago. Wardogs, like Arc Raiders, had a late, hot hype cycle, not a slow burn. And as we know, fresh wishlists convert far better than stale ones. Older wishlists suffer from intent decay, more likely to turn into passive bookmarks. As for what's next, Wardogs isn’t hitting console until 2028, so the first question is retention. DAUs are still climbing (peaking at 1.6M yesterday) and the team is hard at work fixing the launch issues, but PvP live-service is a zero-sum fight for attention. Call of Duty is around the corner, and GTA not far behind that (not on Steam, but still). So Wardogs‘ growth story is far from over. It’s got some maintenance hills to climb and a strong roadmap to deliver on before it can dream of reaching the heights of, say, an Arc Raiders. But make no mistake: even if it never sold another copy, Wardogs is already a huge success. It’s a $40 shooter aimed at a slightly unfashionable audience that stuck to its guns and turned out bloody great. You can’t really replicate what Bulkhead pulled off here, but they knew exactly who the game was for, priced it fairly, built the community before launch (and actually talked to them), cut the PR nonsense, were authentic (to a fault at times), and made something cool. You can’t really replicate what Bulkhead pulled off here, but they knew exactly who the game was for, priced it fairly, built the community before launch (and actually talked to them), cut the PR nonsense, were authentic (to a fault at times), and made something cool. And the community focus is continuing. Bulkhead is actively pushing incremental updates and patch notes focused heavily on reactive quality-of-life feedback. Excited to see where the team goes next. Fair play. Bigger write-up, including more wishlist conversion, review data, and player crossover, on today's free Substack.

Over the past few years, scares like Concord (cancelled, $300M+ down the drain) and softer sales from the likes of Marathon (1.8M sold), Saros (506K sold, $40M), Marvel Tokon (725K, $49M), and Lego Horizon Adventures (under 250K across Steam and PS5, $11M) seem to be making PlayStation more wary about its projects. Today, Sony lifted the press embargo on Wolverine, its big tentpole game from one of its premier studios. It’s had a lukewarm critical reception (by PlayStation prestige and Insomniac standards) – currently 78 on Metacritic, same as the Days Gone Remaster. It’ll sell well all the same, but still… Guerilla recently went back to the drawing board for the Horizon live-service game, and even the latest Naughty Dog game has been delayed several times and is reportedly a while away from completion. While Sony has had a few misses since the end of 2022, it’s also had some hits. Some @alineaanalytics estimates: - Ghost of Yotei (5.3M sold, $400M in gross revenue) - Astro Bot (4.5M, $275M revenue, and a GOTY win) - Stellar Blade (5.3M, $309M in revenue) - Spider-Man 2 ($1.3 billion across platforms) As for PS Studios titles from the past three years that made over $125M on PS5, there are seven as per our estimates (see image). We’ve also broken out the physical splits, because a lot of the reporting there – including ours tbf – has zoomed in on the copies-sold split. The disc decision was largely about margins, control, and killing the secondhand market. So let’s look at what actually matters to PlayStation here, revenue via discs. Clearly, physical is still a huge chunk of the revenue for these games. And it’s all more concentrated on the kinds of games PlayStation is built on. The prestige single-player games skew physical, with Astro Bot at 47%, Stellar Blade at 43%, DS2 at 42%, and Yotei at 38%. Helldivers 2, more live-service and online is only at 8% (although, Sony basically didn’t market the game pre-launch and printed a limited disc run, not expecting a success). But still, physical revenue is huge in the prestige single-player games Sony is getting more cautious about. A disc dollar is worth less to Sony than a digital one, as there’s the retailer cut, manufacturing and distribution. A consideration. Helldivers’ incredible performance on PS5 – almost 23M sold, $800M in revenue, and still 1M monthly players on PS – is a big part of why Sony keeps gunning for another live-service hit (preferably first-party, not second-party) to give it annual recurring revenue for when a hit-driven prestige period gets rough. Although live-service is pretty much zero-sum when it comes to PvP, so winning players can be difficult. Still, PlayStation wants these revenues. It sees how much third-party publishers rake in through FC, Fortnite, and Roblox, and on those it only takes its store cut. That’s 30%; 100% would be nicer, despite the budgetary price of admission (see: Concord…).

From a strictly financial perspective, I can understand Sony’s decision to divest from Physint . In a vacuum, anyway. PR and optics still matter. And right now, quite a bit. Death Stranding 2 has sold 2.5M copies, 1.8M on PlayStation and 700K on Steam (@alineaanalytics estimates). Across those platforms, DS2 has generated $170M. On PlayStation, about 1M of those DS2 copies were sold by the first two months (722K in June 2025 and 381K in July 2025). This – of course – is the Kojima PlayStation core. In the months after, DS2 struggled to sell over 100K, and shifted under 30K in August, with price reductions to $40 doing little to move the needle. Death Stranding 2 has made about $129M on PlayStation, with 65% of that coming in the first two months. On Steam, 550K copies sold in the first two months (80% of its Steam total). It’s had two discounts, which again did very little. Meanwhile, the original Death Stranding has sold about 5M copies at this point in its lifecycle – though it did have some deep discounts down to $20 in that window. To date, Death Stranding 1 has generated about $243M, with 71% on PlayStation, 25% on Steam, and 4% on Xbox. In other words, in the decade since Death Stranding was announced at E3 2016, the two Death Stranding games have generated about $413M in revenue for Sony across platforms – with Death Stranding 2 returning less than the first (so far). Ballpark math: word on the street is that the first Death Stranding cost about $100M to make, and the second somewhere in the $150M–$200M ballpark (longer dev cycle, COVID, and all that). Depending on marketing overhead and the opportunity cost of pulling those Guerrilla developers onto DS1, the franchise has almost certainly broken even – but not by much. That said, Death Stranding has been a real success in China via Steam (DS1 has 27% of its Steam user base in China, while DS2 has 44%). Also, Stellar Blade, another second-party PS game, has a 46% China Steam audience. So by moving away from Steam, PlayStation loses this Trojan horse into China. It would prefer to lock Chinese players into its own ecosystem – but PlayStation barely has an official foothold in China, so Steam was its way in. So while an estimated return on investment of 18% to 38% does amount to several tens of millions in margin, that’s not really a lot for a company like PlayStation – not for that kind of budget. And margins are the name of the game now. And opportunity cost is a thing. We obviously don’t know the full story, either – maybe milestones were missed, maybe Kojima was difficult to work with, maybe any number of things. But that information isn’t public, and either way, this doesn’t look great for PlayStation among core gamers. Especially right now. Wolverine is literally out this week (and isn't reviewing great), and the backlash to the death of physical has been louder than Sony would have expected. From a financial and margins perspective, the Physint divestiture makes sense. But there's more to a brand than those things, especially when the competition is willing to swoop in for some good PR. Sony missed out on FromSoftware after Demon's Souls. Could this end up being another one of those moments?

2026's top PlayStation Plus games by new players via the service (@alineaanalytics estimates) FC 26 took the top spot, with 7.8M new players via its PS+ inclusion. It was free to claim for PlayStation Plus Essential subscribers between May 6 and June 17, during which about 5M players accessed it through their subscription. Many claimed FC 26 during the window but only played later – including over 1M players between the end of the window and the World Cup final. Spider-Man 2 swings in at #2 with 4.3M, having been added to PlayStation Plus Extra’s catalogue on Feb 18. There was a huge spike of new players when it landed on PS+, then it settled to about 100K a week. Though, the recent Spider-Man movie gave it a boost (just like its copies sold). To date, Spider-Man 2 has generated about $1.3 billion across platforms. All eyes are on Wolverine‘s release next week. Grounded, an Xbox port, pulled in 3.2M new players via PlayStation Plus, thanks to monthly PS+ Essential inclusion between June 3 and July 8. Most seem to have been curious – rather than committed – players. About 42% of Grounded‘s PlayStation players have played for under an hour, and about 70% under five hours. Still, it’s sold over 850K copies on PlayStation to date, generating over $25M. If I was a betting man, I’d say the PS+ deal was likely a precursor to a Grounded 2 PS5 release. But whether that still happens under the current administration looks shaky. Big Walk, one of the rare games to actually launch straight onto PS+ as a free monthly title, got 2.8M PlayStation Plus players. That cannibalised sales on PlayStation (a little over 10K copies and under $200K in revenue). But the PlayStation leg of the co-op-only game was likely meant as marketing (and server-filler) for the Steam version. Network effects, and all that. On Steam, Big Walk has sold 1.8M copies and generated $23M. Bangin’ for a 30-ish-person dev team. Undisputed managed 2.8M players via its PlayStation Plus Essential addition between Feb 4 and March 4. This boxing game was more one for the ball-and-gun crowd. In February, when Undisputed was on PS+, its top games by crossover were Fortnite (played by 31% of Undisputed players that month), NBA 2K26 (30%), GTA 5 (26%), Roblox (24%), and FC 26 (24%). The team is hard at work on a sequel, and they have a strong base to springboard off. GTA 5 pulled in another 2.5M PS+ players this year, thanks to its ongoing presence on the Extra tier (re-added for the third time last November). As you’d expect, the period after the GTA 6 extended gameplay reveal on August 27 enjoyed a small spike of new players via PlayStation Plus. More on the Alinea Substack (free!)

By all counts, 2026 has been a bloody fantastic year for new games on Steam, with plenty more bangers to come. I've attached an image of this year's highest-grossing NEW Steam games so far (@alineaanalytics estimates). In total, these six games -- two of which being new IP -- make up a little under $1B of 2026’s Steam gross revenues so far. They account for about 6.6% of Steam's $15 billion in 2026 so far. The top 100 new 2026 games by gross revenues this year is about $2.4B, or about 15.9% of 2026’s Steam overall revenues so far. Of the new-game top 100, 63% were actually new IP, but 52.5% of the revenue ($1.25B) came from established IP. But it’s worth noting Crimson Desert, with its $203M, accounts for about 18% of all new-IP revenue in the top 100. When we take Crimson out of the analysis, the 62 new-IP games make up only about 39%. So yeah, a lot of established IP is doing the legwork, as you'd expect.

gamescom 2026 was AWESOME. Here are the event's top games by new Steam wishlists between Aug 23 and 30 (@alineaanalytics estimates). The top spot wasn't a game at all. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s upcoming expansion, Songs of the Past, nabbed #1 with 451K Steam wishlists by the end of the weekend. It debuted at Opening Night Live, and it’s the first Witcher 3 expansion in over a decade, landing next year after a full Witcher 3 remaster (free for existing owners!) arrives next month. The Witcher 3 has sold around 66M copies, and I’ll be one of those owners jumping back in to refresh myself on the core game (like there isn’t enough to play!), then play the expansion next year. This is all part of CDPR’s plan. The studio is clearly whetting everyone’s appetite for The Witcher 4 in 2028 via a classic bridge strategy. Releasing a free 4K remaster next month – followed by a proper expansion in 2027 – keeps IP top-of-mind across a huge gap between content (games-wise, anyway). It kind of echoes Capcom’s evergreen catalogue strategy. And outsourcing co-development to Fool’s Theory (a studio led by trusted Witcher 3 veterans) keeps CDPR’s internal headcount focused on The Witcher 4. Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, published by Wizards of the Coast and developed by Invoke Studios (a team of ex-Far Cry, Watch Dogs, and Splinter Cell devs), took #2. It’s due to launch in 2027, and it looks brilliant so far. It’s a dark-fantasy open world with third-person spell-slinging. It’s a very Witcher-ish aesthetic. As you might expect, 48% of Warlock’s Steam wishlisters have played Baldur’s Gate 3, and 46% have played The Witcher 3. One to watch. For sure! Ananta took #3 with 302K new wishlists. It’s an open-world game that looks like GTA and Persona had a baby. It was published by NetEase, developed by Naked Rain, and got a trailer at Opening Night Live. I got hands-on at the show, and it wears its influences openly; there’s literal web-slinging (very Spider-Man) and a LOAD of mini-games (Like a Dragon). It’s free-to-play and out in January. For Ananta, Naked Rain is taking the free-to-play, cosmetics-only route. That’s certainly a choice for a single-player open-world game. Without gacha mechanics driving high ARPU, Ananta is betting purely on top-of-funnel reach and long-term retention. This puts pressure on skin appeal when there’s no multiplayer lobby to flex in (although, co-op is reportedly coming later). Then there’s Lego Skylines (273K wishlists between Aug 23 and 30), which does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a cosy Lego twist on the city-builder genre, as shallow or as deep as you fancy (five min quick sesh or ten-hour no-lifer session; latter for me). There’s some family-friendly stuff in there like couch co-op, which is only really viable on console. Iceflake Studios, which Paradox acquired back in 2020 is developing this one. So Paradox is probably looking for a family-friendly onramp to its rad Cities: Skylines games. The overlap there is plain, with 33% of Lego Skylines wishlisters having played Cities: Skylines and 16% Skylines II. There’s no doubt plenty of parents here (and uncles, ahem) planning to indoctrinate the next gen of city-builders. I’ll definitely be playing with my youngest nephew. This one could be big and educational. I’m very curious to see more. Catch a data-packed write-up on the full list on the new free Substack (link is in my X bio).

How to Fish, ANOTHER new friendslop phenomenon, has hit 1.9M copies sold (@alineaanalytics estimates) It’s a wacky fishing-sim spin on low-fi co-op, and it’ll certainly pass 2M copies sold very soon. It hits all the right friendslop gates, being cheap ($4.95 with a 38%-off launch discount), mental, and bloody fun. It’s closing on $8M in revenue. Landfall Games (Content Warning, half of Peak) helped out the devs, Dazed Games, financially here. 53% of How to Fish players have also played Peak, while 27% played Content Warning. SyNeRgY, baby.

Phantom Blade Zero is on track for a hit launch (@alineaanalytics estimates), if it sticks the landing. In the week since pre-orders went live, it's sold 300K copies on Steam and generated $14.5M in revenue, with 10 weeks left until launch. Phantom Blade Zero also just passed 1.6M Steam wishlists, comfortably the most of any game coming out this year. Like a lot of other action game sickos in the West, I’ve been following Phantom Blade Zero since its appearance in a PlayStation Showcase back in May 2023. While that was my first exposure, the so-called Kung Fu punk action game, mixing up steampunk machinery, body modifications, and fast-AF combat, has been in the pipeline for almost a decade – and in full development since 2022. PlayStation is pushing this one hard, with a dedicated 20-minute State of Play deep dive, write-ups on the PlayStation Blog, and some PlayStation-peripheral features that are usually reserved for first-party games, like haptics, adaptive triggers, and 3D audio. In other words, Phantom Blade Zero is getting the full first-party marketing treatment. Let’s get the obvious comparison out of the way. This one is ticking a lot of the same boxes as Black Myth: Wukong. Phantom Blade Zero looks big-budget, bloody awesome looking, and is a culturally rooted Chinese action game that’s resonating with folks across the East and West alike. I had a chat with China gaming consultant @DanielOlimac earlier, and he reckons hype in China is high right now. In Dan’s words (can I call you Dan? I’m calling you Dan...), it’s “nowhere near what it was like for Black Myth: Wukong, but considerably higher than what we saw before the launch of Wuchang.” Looking at Alinea launch-aligned Steam copy estimates, Phantom Blade Zero had sold about 286K copies 70 days before launch (yesterday). It’s about 6.4x more than what Wuchang: Fallen Feathers had sold on Steam 70 days before its launch (45Kish), and about 73% of Black Myth: Wukong’s frankly mental 393Kish. Tracking in the same ballpark as Black Myth: Wukong is hell of a position to be in. Dan's boots-on-the-ground read is that Wukong was a once-in-a-generation cultural movement that basically everyone in China was exposed to, while Phantom Blade Zero is “much more a ‘gamers’ thing’, but in a big way.” Obviously, that could snowball, though. Phantom Blade Zero also – unlike most Western games without a local partner – has the official go-ahead to launch in China. It leans into the home-market appeal. Phantom Blade Zero’s action is based around authentic Chinese martial arts (with Hong Kong action legend Donnie Yen being a mo-cap performer and consultant – as well as consulting from Shaolin and other traditional schools). There’s also a bunch of cool Chinese cultural heritage in the game, including lion dances, Beijing opera, nuo masks, imperial ceremony, ink-wash art, and all that neat stuff. It’s a game that clearly will evoke a similar kind of national pride that Black Myth Wukong did. Of course, it’s ticking all the right boxes for landing well in China. Phantom Blade Zero has a Chinese dub, and is regionally priced well for China and surrounding countries. It costs $60 in the US, but the equivalent of: - $39.84 in China (-33.6% of the U.S. price) - $41.81 in Hong Kong (-30.3%) - $43.25 in Taiwan (-27.9%) More on today's free Alinea Insight Substack.

Gears of War E-Day briefly overtook Modern Warfare 4's Steam pre-orders (@alineaanalytics estimates). For the past couple of months, Modern Warfare 4 and E-Day have been shifting pre-order copies sold on Steam, and MW4 was comfortably leading for a while, until E-Day had its first beta, which ran between August 6 and 10 exclusively for those who pre-ordered. As you can see in the image I've added here, the effect the E-Day beta had on Steam copies sold was quick: - Before and during the beta, E-Day sold over 12K copies a day (versus MW4’s steadier 1.5K-ish) - E-Day then overtook MW4 on August 7 it overtook Modern Warfare 4 outright for about eight days. - But E-Day’s sales halted as soon as the beta ended, at just 2.3K more copies sold across the following week – even though there was an open beta last weekend (that beta attracted another 400K players on Xbox by the way, bringing the total across the betas to 1.6M). The takeaway here, I reckon, is that the E-Day beta was a sugar rush for those probably already wanting to buy it eventually. It just pulled those purchase forward. And the momentum ended as soon as the pre-order-only beta did. Meanwhile MW4 quickened its steady climb, thanks to a first-look trailer on 14 August (revealing that campaign mission in the beta) as well as increasing hype for its preorder-only beta. MW4 retook the lead on 16 August and detonated, adding 6K+ copies in one day on 17 August. Now that MW4’s marketing cycle is kicking off in earnest, its sales across platforms will only continue to grow. MW4’s early beta for digital pre-order folks will no doubt drive sales on Steam, which we'll be covering in an upcoming edition of the newsletter on Substack.

1.2M Xbox players (on console and Windows) checked out Gears of War: E-Day’s first beta (@alineaanalytics estimates). The audience is who you’d expect, the existing Gears faithful. Nearly 90% of beta players have previously played Gears 5, while 55% did their homework for the prequel with last year’s Gears of War: Reloaded. Most of this was via Game Pass, of course. In terms of engagement, 24.1% of the beta players played 10+ hours, 12.7% 15+ hours, and 6.5% clocked 20+ hours. This was a four-ish day beta, so the 6.5% putting in 20+ hours were playing four to five hours every day (on average, more on the weekend, obviously). Some of this was driven by beta rewards that carry over to the full game (mainly an ‘’Epic’’ character skin at level 20, and ‘’Rare’’ weapon set for stuff in the PvE Horde Siege mode). I jumped in myself and had an absolute blast. The new PvE mode is rad, the faster movement feels great (jumping in Gears feels wild), and the PvP is as bloody brilliant (and bloody and brilliant) as ever. My one gripe, as always, for PvP Gears is the roll-wall bounce-Gnasher meta. I’ve never loved the series drifting shotgun-first, and I’d dearly love a no-shotgun mode – or at least one where we don’t spawn in with an OP shotgun. I digress. On Steam, pre-order copies roughly doubled off the back of the beta, from around 50K before it to 100K after. Fence-sitters and later-buyers bit the bullet to get in, probably nudged by the strong word of mouth. Obviously, 100K Steam pre-orders with a month and a half still to go is a healthy leading indicator for launch. Missing PS5 might come back to bite Xbox on this one, though. It’s on Steam anyway, after all. Anyway, the Gears E-Day open beta kicks off today and runs until 17 August, so we’ll have more beta numbers next week. You can subscribe to our Substack (link is in my bio) to get those numbers in your inbox. And fook me, those Gears controllers are NICE.