UK Boxed Charts: Hitman 3 Debuts At Top Spot, But Only 27% Sold For Xbox

Not that surprising considering PS4 outright did better and the Hitman games let you transfer content from the last titles, giving exactly zero reason to "jump ship".

This makes sense for a couple reasons though. The UK tends to be PlayStation heavy from what I can tell, and it also seems like there are more ps5s that have gotten into real consumers hands than there have been series x’s across the board. I have several friends who say the Sony waiting list thing worked well for them while I still hadn’t found even a waiting list or anything I could do for the series x as of this last week (miraculously got a series x ordered from GameStop with all access over the weekend, after months of checking sites when I had free time, but still have to wait a while for it to ship).

There are more Playstation's so that makes sense and more PS5's were available at launch than the Series consoles. Not only that but because progress carries over, most will buy this on the same platform. Personally I picked this up digitally for the Series S and it plays and looks fantastic on that.

This is the first generation that I genuinely don't see the point in buying physical ganes anymore as you lose some of the advantages these consoles offer

@xMightyMatt14x Game had pre-ordered / waiting list up Series X for a few days last week so it might be they are following the PS5 there. I can't really see a point is doing different between consoles.

I wonder how much 3rd party games will be like this for Xbox this whole gen. If you have game pass would you bother buying new games like this when they could end up on game pass anyway. Bit like Netflix. I don't buy or rent films/series because they will likely end up on streaming eventually.

This then makes me wonder how it will shape the gaming landscape. Will all games eventually have to go onto game pass to compete equally or will game pass end up where low quality / selling games go as most sales will be on PS? Hard to know really.

@StonyKL sadly where I’m at in the US we don’t have GAME :/ I kept trying Best Buy GameStop and walmsrt and none of them were doing waiting lists. Like I said though I finally got one at GameStop but it won’t ship for a bit.

That’s a great point though about the effect of gamepass. I could see sales being less because of people primarily playing gamepass games (and waiting on bigger third parties to be on it before they try). I’m one of those. The only way I would try Hitman personally is if it was on gamepass, as its not something that is a “must buy” for me.

It’ll definitely be interesting to see how things play out.

Xbox is suffering. The trouble is they are so obsessed with game pass that they are just not bothered about physical sales anymore and it’s a dangerous game they are playing.

@Carck Maybe. I get that but everything from MS right now feels a little flat to me. It certainly doesn’t feel very next gen.

I don't know about others, much less the UK, but MS attitude towards respecting my purchases (doing their best to keep my old 360 digital purchases working on Series X) has actually convinced me to go all digital on Xbox games, while I still don't trust Sony (as they seem to be killing digital PS3 market) and much less Nintendo. If I buy games for either of those, I go physical.

I'm sure the difference has a lot to do with this being a PS4 game, and the UK PS4 VS XBox One being a non-starter race, but do wonder if in general Xbox owners are more likely to go digital than PS owners.

Sony is dominating, which is to be expected. They smashed it with the PS4 and people are just continuing on with them. PlayStation is the hot product, it’s trendy and Sony are reaping the benefits right now.

Let’s see how things are in a couple of years when Microsoft will have some big hitters coming out. I don’t think MS will catch Sony this gen, just like last, but it isn’t just about physical and hardware sold anymore for Microsoft, they’re playing a different game.

This was going to be the obvious result. It's the UK - that means PS is tops by default. The game carries over saves, and PS4 was the leader last gen already. PS5 seems to have shipped more units than XSX thus far, especially in Europe. And on top of all that it's a chart of physical sales. Starting even from the launch of the X1, it was clear Microsoft's entire shtick was about it's digital environment (right down the parts that earned infamy.) Sony seems to double down on physical media, and has a consumer base that favors physical media. Most of the features that make Xbox appealing revolve around its superior digital ecosystem. From Game Pass to BC, to just the way they handle purchases, data, hard drive copying/moving, etc. Quick Resume, for that matter. Most of the "reason to buy an Xbox" comes down to superior handling of a digital ecosystem vs PS. For all physical media players, I think the two platforms seem a lot more identical. So it's kind of a given that on a physical media format it would heavily favor PS no matter what. If we added digital to this number, Sony would still be ahead, but I imagine it wouldn't look so stark.

@Carck Everyone keeps saying Demon's Souls is "truly next gen" which I find incomprehensible. It's another 1400p/60 or 4k/30 game that doesn't even use raytracing - by that standard Watch Dogs Legion is more next gen, visually. The level design, gameplay systems, enemy placement, enemy AI/moveset etc. is inherently limited to the PS3 hardware's limitations otherwise it's not an accurate remake (and Bluepoint went out of their way to make sure to keep it identical, so much so they actually kept the Cell code for combat and ported it to x86...(that takes an iron stomach.)

There's nothing that even borders "next gen" about that game. At best I'd say it's a PS4 Pro exclusive that you can only run on PS5. Miles is quite a bit more "next gen" given it's graphics presentation. And even that is an updated PS4 engine which is an updated launch X1 engine (same underlying engine as Sunset Overdrive.)

Ah, the facts of life. Physical games are dying, one way or the other. I can't say I'm bothered. I love the service based model and don't see the point of owning anything these days as far as music, movies or games are concerned. Hell, I even subscribed to Microsoft 365 instead of buying a single licence. I do realise that I'm probably in the minority here, but I was in the majority of naydayers a couple of years ago. Make of it what you will.

@NEStalgia I’m just interested, did the 360 outsell the PS3 in the UK? I kind of remember it being close back when I had one. The Xbox one really messed the Xbox brand up, if it wasn’t for that awful launch I think Xbox would be stronger even to this day in the UK. The rest of Europe is and always has been playstation, I don’t see that changing.

@Carck At least Miles has shiny windows (and a ton of detail.) Souls....just looks like a PS4 game, full stop. It's quite literally not doing anything that a PS4 couldn't do, except doing it at 60fps where a base PS4 might do it at 30 and a Pro might do 45-55 or so. The fact that it can only do 60fps at 1440p without even having raytracing screams "it's a BC game, internally!' Even Ubisoft's Anvil engine is doing better than that on the new hardware. With a TON more draw distance and visible geometry involved. Souls as a PS5 exclusive is just so funny because it makes no sense. I assume it's more a marketing based reasoning - it's a core gamer game so making it new hardware exclusive makes early adoption more appealing to the core.

@Fenbops I'm not sure about the UK numbers. @Tharsman might know off-hand though. I know 360 won in the US and it wasn't close. And worldwide, though PS3 eventually "won", it only "won" after that really budget Ultra Slim model, after the PS4/X1 were already out. At that point it was mostly selling just for people to play the exclusives, and a lot of those sales were probably used copies. I doubt financially they really won much of anything at all compared to 360 that gen even if they can use "hardware units shipped" as a victory metric.

@NEStalgia, @Fenbops pretty sure ps3 outsold 360 in UK but was at least close. Otherwise think US is the only country where xbox sells close to PS normally. I can't see any reason why MS will ever get close to Sony in terms of console numbers worldwide because it will only ever be the US that favours that company. I do think Game pass is the one chance of changing this and this is still an unknown.
I think most people with a PS have always been happy so no reason to leave that ecosystem, especially now back compatibility is a thing. I was burnt by 360 era and moved over to Sony and no reason yet not to leave, however giving Xbox a go this gen alongside PS5 due to the lure of Game Pass. But unless something terrible happens with Sony I can't see not ever owning PS unless their games all go to PC. At that point there would be need for either PS or Xbox and could instead use the combined money to purchase an uber PC.

@StonyKL I can't quite figure out the sort of corporate nationalistic stance it seems like exists for games in the EU. There seems to be a common view there that MS does well in the US because it's American. Which isn't the case, it's just well marketed so it's a product people see. Nobody thinks of any multinational corporation as domestic, and Microsoft as a whole is a "love to hate them" company in general, so their identity works against them more than for, even here. Sony's not really any less evil, and in a lot of ways are more evil. I'm always confused by how EU seems to view the relationship of Xbox and the US. I can see the exclusives being the main swaying point, but brand identity....that one confuses me.

Physical sales seems like a poor way to rate sales success in this day and age.

@uptownsoul I don't have, off the cuff, sources on sales data of physical vs retail, but 2015-2017 was aaaages ago in terms of the digital sales paradigm, and all three platforms, even Nintendo have been posting marked, steady increases in digital year on year. And 2020 with the pandemic has been seeing digital surge- not MS specific, as PXB wasn't even live until early 2020 so I've been following the NL side of the news primarily for years (I couldn't force myself into Push Square until the PS5 launch!) but digital sales have been gaining across the board.

No matter which platform we're talking about, the past 3 years are going to show a tilt toward digital compared to 2015-2017. Up to 2017 was Switch launch period, and Nintendo alone has seen a shift from mostly physical at launch to, I don't know their split, but heavy digital sales as normal now. We, of course, don't know how much the pandemic driven digital spike is permanent versus temporary. But it seems likely to me that once people taste digital convenience, they're less likely to go back to physical.

For Xbox it's only a minor leap of logic to presume digital is more dominant than the other two platforms considering since 2017 they've been pushing their digital ecosystem features and Game Pass as primary platform features, and are, of course, the only platform vendor that has had a disc-less console in their lineup for years until now, so a percentage of their install base has had no choice with the X1 SAD, and again with Series S where part of (and eventually the majority of, if numbers fall where Phil expects over time) the install base will have no disc drive. Well, they tried pushing their digital ecosystem at X1 launch with the whole DRM disaster, and that didn't work out, but they kind of reinvented the digital proposition with features and services in the 1S/1X launch period and positioned it as a feature rather than a prison and it gained more traction.....

I was surprised to see Sony seemingly going so hard into physical again. It wasn't long ago speculation was that both consoles would launch without disc drives and physical would be dead. They did launch the discless PS5, but they showed it no love and seemed to offer very limited availability of it as though they didn't expect it to succeed. And the tiny SSD doesn't scream of embracing digital. There's a more stalwart physical media fanbase on PS than I thought, though that might have to do with the countries they do business in that XB doesn't that are less digitally oriented locales. Though when you look at retailer sales at Amazon US, the #1 selling thing in PS store is PSN cards for years. Somehow I haven't looked at the MS rankings. If I were to blind guess the #1 seller, without actually looking, I'd bet it's Game Pass cards.

....or GTA vBucks....

@uptownsoul I didn't mean to imply that Xbox digital games were outselling PS digital games. What I meant was the split of digital vs physical sales on Xbox is going to be skewed more heavily digital than the split of digital vs physical sales on PS. I.E. if (totally made up numbers) PS4 has 40% physical, 60% digital, I'd expect XB to be more like 20% physical, 80% digital. So seeing a report of physical-only sales per platform would make the gulf look wider than it likely is.

PS has the larger install base overall, so naturally it's going to have more total sales on most titles in most regions.

But yeah, Ubisoft's reports should make it a lot more clear.

Did MS have exclusive marketing for those two? I definitely remember seeing lots of splashes for it all over the PS store pages as well. It was well highlighted even if not marketed in the main media specifically.

Unfortunatley I fear that Legion and Fenyx overall had weak sales, which is a shame. Fenyx is an amazing game. And Legion is, gameplay-wise, the best Watch Dogs, although I feel like the "police state" theme, and some of the very dark turns in the story (body snatchers), felt more at home for Far Cry than for Watch Dogs....it lost the feeling of being one man against the digital surveilance future the public is blissfully unaware of and became standard anti-Fascist resistance gaming. Torture cells in every other building feels far too out of place for the W_D series.

@uptownsoul I think you're still misunderstanding what I said. I'm not talking about Playstation sales vs Xbox sales. I'm saying that a greater percentage of Microsoft's sales are likely to be digital than physical compared PS digital vs PS physical sales. I don't think you're going to find many people here or on Push Square that don't expect that to be the case. But we'd need IOI or MS to release that information.