Today one of the directors of Days Gone tweeted in response to the announcement that Ghost of Tsushima sold 8 million copies that his game had already sold over 8 million copies within a year and a seven months of release:
Is this even legal?
The first reason to doubt that this is true is that Sony is extremely secretive above their game sales. Sales updates are infrequent and they pretty much only announce news if they think it’s really good.
If Days Gone actually sold 8 million copies that fast, there is no way Sony would not announce that themselves. Jeff Ross is saying they were biased against his studio, and people online are saying that they only care about Metacritic scores, but how this logically justifies Sony hiding the scores has still yet to be explained.
Would Sony really sacrifice making their company look way better just to punish some of their developers for getting a bad Metacritic score? Is it likely that one of those developers who left the company would then leak sales data on Twitter out of spite? The whole story is incredibly unlikely.
The statistics say it isn’t likely
For Days Gone we know the sales were basically entirely in the US and Europe since that game does not really appeal to the Japanese market and the majority of PS4 games don’t sell much there anyway.
A game with confirmed similar sales numbers to these alleged Days Gone sales numbers is Luigi’s Mansion 3. The best numbers we have for a similar amount of time are 9.59 million sold after 17 months. Jeff Ross is claiming that his game sold 8+ million after 19 months. Realistically, those 2 months made close to no difference, since most games sales drop off sharply over time, and there is no reason to believe Days Gone is drastically different.
Let’s see how Luigi’s Mansion 3 and Days Gone compared on the charts that we know for a fact are accurate:
Clearly the game was aimed at the North American market since it takes place in the US and the subject matter isn’t particularly relatable for other regions. The North American market is also the biggest market for console games so most of the sales should come from there. According to NPD, during 2019 Luigi’s Mansion 3 physical only sales starting from October 31st made more money than Days Gone physical and digital sales starting from April 26th. Digital makes up a pretty big percentage of game sales nowadays, so it is fairly safe to say that Luigi’s Mansion 3 basically doubled what Days Gone made that year. Days Gone was on sale for a lot of the year at $39.99 and $19.99, but that is more of an indicator that sales were falling off than that they were doing particularly well. The only way that Days Gone beats Luigi’s Mansion 3 here is an unprecedented amount of people deciding that a AAA game with a 71 Metacritic score that dropped in price quickly was worth their money.
In the UK, Luigi’s Mansion 3 beat Days Gone by multiple places during 2019 in physical sales. The UK is typically a bigger than of PlayStation than Nintendo so this does not bode well for Days Gone’s sales in the rest of Europe.
Beyond 2019 things get a lot murkier, but it would be extremely surprising if Days Gone was selling anywhere near as well as Luigi’s Mansion 3, since the latter gained over 4 million between the end of 2019 and the end of March 2021. Days Gone might not have even managed this much during its first year given how badly it was beaten by Luigi’s Mansion 3 in the charts, which sold 5.37 million in 2019 (previous link) if you include the digital sales. Where all of these sales Jeff is claiming exist came from and why they would happen aren’t exactly clear.
Where are these numbers from?
There are a two much more likely possibilities than these numbers being real: he is estimating or he just made them up. There is also the much less likely possibility that some leaker told him this, but those numbers are probably made up by the leaker too.
Either way these numbers are more than likely garbage. Until you hear something from a trustworthy source it makes no sense to try to prove anything about Sony or the game with these numbers. It is true that this story would be quite the shock if these numbers were verifiably true, though.
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