UK Sales Charts: Strong PS5 Sales Put The Last of Us 2, Gran Turismo 7 Back in the Top 10

Sony keep dominating is great for the industry.

Sony's making up for lost time! Off to the races now that PS5s can be relatively easily procured. Now, can we please officially start the "next" gen?

So TLoU 2 is there because of the popularity of the TV show and also it was like 12 bucks on PSN. I finally scooped it up. GT7 is most likely there because of a boost in sales courtesy of the launch of PSVR2. Nice

@4kgk2 how is one company dominating good for the industry?

@Jireland92 because they deserve it for putting in the hard work.

Nice to see Hogwarts still doing numbers ^__^

@4kgk2 that doesn’t answer my question. How is one company dominating an entire industry good for the industry?

@Jireland92 how is it bad?

Long live mario kart

@4kgk2 Do you know what a Monopoly is? That’s what you get when one company dominates an entire industry. Not to mention the lack of competition leads to stagnation in output.

God of War Ragnarok one of the best games I played in 2022 and Hogwarts Legacy one of the best in 2023.

Great to see them both on the chart.

@Jireland92

A monopoly is bad but it isn't Sony's fault that MS can't keep up.

@TheTony316 I agree but that still doesn’t make Sony dominating a good thing.

@Jireland92 Sony isn’t dominating by buying up publishes and taking games off they’re competitors consoles. Sony earned the right to dominate by having the superior product they help built and funded compared to its competitor.

@Hundred_Hand_Slap GT7 is 35quid physical, more likely the price than VR.

Right now there are some great deals to be had, if you have disc

GT7 <3
One of the best racing games ever made

It's fully deserved when you earn it, and boy have they earned it. Constantly putting out top tier 1st party games since the middle of the PS3 days which made the PS3 far more competitive against the 360 in the end. This success continued massively throughout the PS4 and now the PS5 is continuing what it was supposed to be doing at the start if wasn't for the shortages. Success from NOT spending many a billions on massive acquisitions which have hundreds of games will always be genuinely earned rather than the buying everything up success

@northofthewall no 2k was the first to raise they’re game prices. I heard Sony is now spending 150 million to 200 million just to make one of they’re AAA games. So I don’t mine paying little more this gen because I want bigger more detail games. Gaming is a luxury it isn’t Sony job to accommodate people who can’t afford the hobby.

Good to see Hogwarts Legacy still going strong. I’ve finished it now, but did enjoy my time with it. In fact, I just wanna praise PushSquare for actually reviewing it. I’ve noticed several outlets that have simply refused to review it (Eurogamer, Edge, Play magazine) all for obvious reasons. It’s a shame really cos the devs did a great job on the game.

@4kgk2 no Sony dominates due to having a more effective marketing strategy. The quality of the game is not what sells it, it’s how you advertise it.

And as @northofthewall put it, Sony dominating leads to them becoming cocky and arrogant, which leads to disaster as the PS3 showed. So it doesn’t matter how you spin it, one company dominating the industry is not good or healthy for that industry.

@Jireland92 PS3 wasn’t a disaster , people were just simply broke . the ps3 runs absolute laps around the ps5 . the ps5 is $500 for nothing

Sometimes end up unintentionally having conversations with PS haters on here more than I do with people that actually adore PS itself. Had to do a little clean up ignore on here, one or two more will come in time no doubt. Feel free to ignore me if need be, but know Im not the one going over to all these Xbox sites hating on the Xbox then immediately followed by bigging the PS5 up. I know where my lane is and I like to stay in it. Almost daily enjoy this Push Square community. Soon rather have quick grown up conversations with like minded gamers rather than the sly

@Jireland92 a monopolizing and dominating the market are not the same thing buddy, sony is dominating the market bc they make excellent games, microsoft on the other hand can't make them so they're solution is buying every big publisher and paying them to make them, and before you start no, sony buying small independent studios after years of a symbiotic relationship or doing timed exclusivity deals doesn't compare to what microsoft is doing, if sony had the same money microsoft has playstation would be unbeatable.

@Jireland92 organic dominance is fine, buying up publishers is not.

this is UK PHYSICAL ONLY sales data pointless when 80% of sales are digital

@Jireland92 "no Sony dominates due to having a more effective marketing strategy. The quality of the game is not what sells it, it’s how you advertise it." really bro XD

how many disc copies of last of us 2 did they make when almost 3 years later is still for sale new sealed for £9

@Doublecell you do realise Sony bought most of its studios right

I'd like to think that GT7 is back on the charts because of the tremendous success of PSVR2 invigorating software sales. That's it, right? Right? I'm just going to keep believing it is.... I mean it turned a racer that was pretty well made and fun into the definitive only racer I'll touch....it's doing something right! I swear the last patch improved the VR2 visuals quietly. They didn't say they did, but ever since then the visuals keep wowing me way more than they did before, it just seems much sharper and higher res closer up, including the cockpit, and the blur seems to be pushed farther away. I get distracted by officials/photographers standing right off the track and end up rear ending someone, lol. That didn't happen before the patch!

@trev666 had a strong working relationship with most of the studio they bought and most of the studios Sony brought were small when they was acquired. Unlike Microsoft who is buying big publishers they didn’t help to build.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Both add up. GT7 is great. Had a great time getting the plat.

@trev666 Sony bought these studios when they were practically unknown and helped build them into who they are today, they didn't buy already established billion dollar publishers.

@nomither6 People Tend To Forget Just What The PS3 Came With at launch That console was a beast.

@LordBakemono yes really. If a game being good quality was all it needed to sell well then every well reviewed game would sell millions of copies. But as we know that isn’t the case. In fact there are examples of the opposite happening, bad games selling really well.

And the reason for that was due to being marketed well. Marketing is the lifeblood for a video games success, and a lot of why Sony is dominating right now is due to how effective they are when it comes to advertising their product. Why do you think companies sign exclusivity deals with them? Because they want access to their marketing power.

@Doublecell it really isn’t. Any kind of dominance is bad.

@Areus exactly , people forget . we had it good and didn’t even know it !

@4kgk2 Sony earned the right to dominate through "natural" means?

Don't look up how they got all those games to go to the PS1. And how they kept it that way.

@Jireland92 you sounding very silly now. I’m not trying to be mean but you don’t think Sony putting out great exclusives help sell the ps5.

@4kgk2 no, because how can a customer know it’s a great exclusive if they haven’t played it yet? The answer is they don’t. The only way you can get them to buy it is to market the game to them in an effective way. Almost all major video game success stories are down to how well they were marketed. The exclusives being good certainly helps build confidence in the brand but it’s not what puts units in people’s homes. Good marketing does.

@4kgk2 I fully agree with you, compare what Sony has spent on single studios over the last 30 years vs what Microsoft has spent on single studio's and publishers. Yet for Sony to be the ones on top dominating the way they have is absolutely astonishing and deserves praise to see what they have built whilst spending peanuts compared to the main competition.

That is how you run a business successfully, and this is without taking away big games from the competition like Microsoft are doing.

@Mauzuri Much like PS5 hardware bundles with a download code helped HFW and GoW Ragnarok get high in the charts, there's a recent Switch bundle with a Mario Odyssey download code and some Mario movie stickers.

I need some popcorn for the amount of salt in comment section 🍿

@FenIsMightier What stuff is there to sell from MS they push their gamepass really hard. Why as a retailer would you go out of your way to set up something that will be free on Gamepass.

Multiplatform games is what are around which are available with Gamepass cheap or free firstparty titles are on Gamepass for free on day one why would you put any effort into Xbox.

@Haruki_NLI Dont look up how Nintendo worked in the NES era then.

I'm planning on picking up Ragnarok when I have finished Wo Long, so I will be adding to its total very soon. And the wife is getting Hogwarts as her next game on ps5

@northofthewall nope. Last time Sony dominated was with ps4 and we got awesome games. It doesn't need to be the underdog to make excellent games.

People will av bought TLOU2 after watching the HBO show.

@trev666 and improved them and churned out AAA GOTY contending and winning games. Microsoft simply buy already huge devs, keep everything the same, make the same games an make them exclusive.

@Flaming_Kaiser Or how Xbox worked with the 360.

They've all done it, but you can't claim any of them had truly organic success. It's a mix of dumb luck, coercion and borderline bribery.

@FenIsMightier i dont think its just that, also to do with a larger % of Playstation gamers buying physical over xbox players. why would a store give them more space?

I really dont get people complaining about AAA costing £70 per game. Have you guys forgotten that a freaking SNES game could cost up to £80 in the 90s? Accounted for inflation that's like £150!!

@havoc33 inflation prices are so misleading. look at all the parts to make the cartridge (no longer a cost) not to mention no instruction booklets/artwork books etc. plus how many more gamers there are.

@Areus ps3 came out with nothing good save resistance and it was heavily criticized for its hardware infrastructure (developers claimed it was much harder to program comparing to the xbox 360) and its high launch price, so i'm not really sure what are you talking about.

@Haruki_NLI mmmm maybe bc it was much more expensive to launch a game in cartridge format compared to a disc and bc disc had much more storage capacity, so i'm not really sure what are you talking about here

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Are you seriously just gonna leave out the increased complexity and cost of game development? The average team required to make a AAA game these days have ballooned up to over a 100 people easily. And again, with inflation, the salaries are obviously way, way higher than in the 90s. It was not common back then to be able to buy every game you wanted, and here we are in 2023 and people have backlogs bigger than a black hole.

@havoc33 team numbers etc have absolutely nothing to do with inflation.

@FenIsMightie i don't know if you're been living under a rock for the past few months months but microsoft itself said gamepass is cannibalizing the sales on their platform, and this came from microsoft so i'm not sure what's your argument there buddy, xbox fanboys are always saying things like " i'll just wait for it to come to game pass" and they're always trying to ridicule people who buy games, they wear that like a badge of honor

@Jireland92 you are so ture. MS now has 60-70% of the cloud gaming service market. MS OS has 80-90% of the market share in the cloud gaming market. Sony only has 10-20%. It is clear microsoft and it's OS are dominate the cloud gaming market. Without sony MS will occupy almost 100% of the cloud gaming OS. It is really bad for the gaming market.

@4kgk2 oh good lord.

@FenIsMightier Well that's a fat no since most of the physical sales are sold on PS5, an example, REmake 4 sold 65% of its digital and physical copies againts 20% on xbox and 15% on pc, and its always the same situation in multiplatform games, and that's bc xbox players would rather wait for the game to come to gamepass (even if the game never comes to game pass XD) so once again you're wrong in your assumptions, and sure buddy if you dont want to "entertain" personal anecdotes maybe you should stop doing the same mister "I'm not in the UK, so not entirely related to this article, but I did mention this to my wife when we went shopping the other day. " lol XD

Not that either series needed it but both Mario and The Last of Us got boosts from the movie and tv show respectively. Maybe MS should consider doing something with Gears of War.

@NEStalgia well GT7 is available on PS4 also and is now up in the digital charts also, despite not having had a discount int he last month on the PS store. Pretty confident it's driven by VR which is good to see. REVillage is the same boat. Been out for ages but now one of the top selling PS titles.

@maybemaybemaybe That's awesome if VR really is having that level of impact on the charts!

@Jireland92 "no Sony dominates due to having a more effective marketing strategy. The quality of the game is not what sells it, it’s how you advertise it."

That's very likely to be untrue, which is why Microsoft has been bolstering their reliable line up, including acquiring ABK. Otherwise it would've been relatively easy for any company to keep up just by changing their marketing to what Sony has been doing. Surely advertising is built off the back of quality first and foremost.

@bkeswick in an ideal world yes, but we don’t live in an ideal world. How many crappy products have you or other people bought simply because it was advertised well? I know I’ve bought my fair share.

Don’t get me wrong, having a good product helps you build a strong fan base and boosts confidence in the brand, but when it comes to making a sale, marketing is king.

@Jireland92 That's a slightly different point then. Earlier you ruled out the quality as the reason why Sony dominates by stating that "The quality of the game is not what sells it, it’s how you advertise it" as if there wasn't any interdependency between them, so I was replying in that specific context.

Quality can be a number of factors - whatever the addressable market is drawn to - so there are some options there and not every company does it the same way, but you need some kind of quality which builds up your reputation in the first place in some way shape or form.

@bkeswick To clarify, what I meant was that the quality of a game cannot be a factor when selling a game to a customer because the customer has no means of knowing that until they play it for themselves. The only thing they have to go off of are adverts or gameplay presentations which aren’t always indicative of the final product. Well, those and demo’s, but they’re becoming increasingly rare.

@Jireland92 Good god man, is that how you compartmentalize the notion of quality when people typically perceive quality in the broader scope of their past experience and history of quality as well as the critical reception.

But fine, I suppose I get what you mean at a technical level if we degenerate the notion down to that narrow scope.

@bkeswick past experiences can give a general idea of the quality you might expect with a game. There’s a reason why games are sometimes marketed with the phrase “from the maker of (insert game title here)”. People will read that, remember a past experience with it and pick it up if they remember it fondly.

Putting out quality products helps people come back. However, it’s not a guarantee your future products will sell better.

Sony is pretty consistent when it comes to putting out quality games, but that doesn’t mean all their games sell equally. While games like The Last of Us, Spider-Man and God of War sell big numbers, games like Gravity Rush, Sackboy and Tearaway sell moderately well at best or poorly at worst.

You want to know what the first group has that the second doesn’t? Massive advertising budgets. They’re marketed to hell and back to get the games into as many peoples faces as possible. After all, how can people buy a game if they don’t know it exists.

@Haruki_NLI Lets hope the idiots will eventually learn we just want good games. I would love to see some older IP make a comeback a Legend of Dragoon, Dark Cloud, Infamous, ICO. I would even accept a remake or remaster of these classics.

I could not give less about COD and all that mess Bethesda never made a game that did run good on Playstation hardware I don't count three remasters that finally run as intended.

But i also get annoyed about people talking about the big bad Sony going up against the small Microsoft that already has tons of great studios and a unending amount of wealth.

And if you give Nintendo the chance they will be just as bad in the end they are all the same.

@FenIsMightier I guess you never read the comments here and in a lot of other places free on Gamepass Ill wait.

I think there was a article here that Microsoft said themselves that Gamepass kanibalise their real sales for games. Good call naming the biggest 3rd party titles that are not profitable to put on Gamepass.

Push for a bigger chance for a real sale or hoping they will buy the game instead of a waiting on Gamepass. I know what company I would be giving a bigger space.

You know what happend with the PSP Go in the Netherlands digital only they just didnt stock the thing no money to be made.

@Jireland92 But you're supposed to be speaking in the context of Sony's success as a platform, not in the context of a new game in a vacuum. That was the context I had replied in.

Your point makes no sense when judging a business as a whole because the history of quality does indeed play a part in generating traction. That's in spite of the fact that a new product is an unknown quantity. In that regard each round doesn't entirely start with a clean slate.

Same works the other way - keep pumping out bad products, everything starts to go the other way. That's in spite of the fact that the next new game is just as an unknown quantity as before.

Of course advertising works, but the idea that quality of games has nothing to do with it is absurd when speaking in the context of a platform.