PlayStation has been delving more and more into the PC space for years, an initiative it truly kicked off with Horizon Zero Dawn in 2020. Since then, many of the console maker’s heavy hitters have come to PC from Marvel’s Spider-Man to Ghost of Tsushima. But there is one that has been far and away the best-selling one of the bunch, something a new context-rich report has revealed.
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According to estimates from gaming data firm Alinea Analytics, Helldivers 2 is the best-selling PlayStation first-party game on PC. As shown in the chart below, Arrowhead’s acclaimed multiplayer shooter is said to have sold around 12.7 million copies since its launch in February 2024. Alinea notes that this is over double what it sold on PS5.
Xbox numbers were not mentioned this time, but Alinea previously stated in October how it estimated that Helldivers 2 had sold around 20 million copies: 12.6 million on Steam, 5.4 million on PS5, and 1.4 million on Xbox. A lot of those Xbox copies were said to have sold in the first week, as Alinea estimated Helldivers 2 sold around a million copies in just six days on Xbox. The PS5 version was said to have sold around 633,000 copies in its debut week, but that’s likely because word of mouth hadn’t been given much time to spread. Helldivers 2 is also the fast-selling PlayStation game of all time. Given all of these earlier reports of its success both on and off PC, it’s not too surprising that Helldivers 2 is on top of PlayStation’s best-selling games on PC.
Helldivers 2 Has Sold Well on PC
The chart only includes Steam (Helldivers 2 is not on other storefronts like the Epic Games Store like PlayStation’s other games) and is from Alinea’s own estimates. The other bits of data show that Horizon Zero Dawn sales estimates are around 4.5 million units on Steam, while 2018’s God of War is said to have sold 4.2 million copies. Days Gone sales estimates on Steam are around 3.4 million, and Marvel’s Spider-Man comes in at fifth place with 2.7 million estimated copies. While Marvel’s Spider-Man was a much more acclaimed game than Days Gone, the lateness of the port may have affected sales since it came to PC four years after launching on PS4. The gap between PS4 and PC for Days Gone was only two years.
These five games equal around 27.5 million units, whereas Alinea notes that around 43 million total copies of PlayStation-published games have been sold on Steam. This is said to have generated $1.5 billion in gross revenue for PlayStation ($1.2 billion for PlayStation and $350 million for Valve because of the revenue split).
Alinea also paints a broader picture of PlayStation ports on PC and explains how the novelty is waning. God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West have also sold more slowly than their predecessors. 2018’s God of War has sold two-and-a-half times faster than Ragnarok during a 427-day time frame. Forbidden West sold three times slower during a 608-day period than Zero Dawn on Steam. Marvel’s Spider-Man continued this trend, too, as a 294-day period showed how the first game sold 1.4 million copies on Steam, over twice as many as its sequel.
While ultimately lucrative and not at all signs of a struggle, Alinea concludes that the “nature of demand has changed” and figuring out when to launch these games on PC remains a key thing to focus on. It explains how PlayStation has to “[find] the right interval that protects PS5 software sales while still satisfying a PC audience that increasingly expects timely releases” and “capture peak console demand while still capitalising on the strong appetite for premium single-player games on PC.”
PlayStation’s success on PC has been pointed out about before. Sales charts from 2022 showed how PlayStation games shot up significantly when ported to PC. Former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida also said in February how porting games on PC was “almost like printing money” and these ports helped PlayStation “invest in new titles now that the cost of games has increased.” Former SIE President and CEO Jim Ryan joined the choir by saying how putting games on PC was a “straightforward decision.”
“There’s an opportunity to expose those great games to a wider audience and recognise the economics of game development, which are not always straightforward,” said Ryan. “The cost of making games goes up with each cycle, as the calibre of the IP has improved. Also, our ease of making it available to non-console owners has grown. So it’s a fairly straightforward decision for us to make.”
Ryan’s predecessor, Shawn Layden, has even praised the decision, saying exclusivity was an “Achille’s heel” when development budgets are as big as they are now.
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Image courtesy of Paramount+
