First Week ‘Anthem’ Retail Sales Are Looking Pretty Bad

Electronic Arts and BioWare’s new science-fiction, online multiplayer action-RPG, Anthem, topped […]

February 28, 2019, 1:02pm

Electronic Arts and BioWare’s new science-fiction, online multiplayer action-RPG, Anthem, topped the UK retail sales chart this past week, but that’s about all it did.

While Anthem managed to overtake every other game on the retail market in the UK last week, it didn’t really have to do much to do so. Retail sales weren’t great, so much so, that Anthem — which only managed to sell half the first week sales of Mass Effect: Andromeda — still managed to come out as top dog.

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As you may remember, Mass Effect: Andromeda’s first week sales at retail in the UK weren’t very good thanks to a pretty disastrous launch that was defined by bugs and mostly disappointment. And so for Anthem to only get half as many sales as Mass Effect: Andromeda in its first week in the same market, is not a good sign for the game. It also means it sold about a quarter of what Mass Effect 3 did in its first week.

To put that number into further context, Anthem sold about 25 percent of what Destiny 2 sold in its first week at retail in the UK. Now, Anthem is a brand-new IP, while Destiny 2 was a sequel to one of the biggest games this generation, so, to compare them may be a bit unfair to the former. But we’re talking a discrepancy of 75 percent, that’s huge, regardless of the surrounding circumstances.

Of course, all of these figures should be taken with a grain of salt because they are only of the retail market in the UK. And with the rise of the digital marketplace, retail sales are naturally declining. But they haven’t declined nearly enough to justify the massive decrease in sales from the likes of 2017’s Andromeda and Destiny 2.

Anyway, while many suspected Anthem would compete alongside Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 as the best-selling game of Q1 2019, it didn’t even manage to touch Resident Evil 2 or Kingdom Hearts 3’s week one retail sales in the UK. In other words, The Division 2 should comfortably be sitting at the top come the end of March if all goes even semi-well for it.

Below, you can view the top 10 best-selling games in the UK at retail last week: