We live in strange times. As part of Xbox’s new olive branch (ie. revenue expansion) by putting some former Xbox exclusives on PlayStation, we now have a situation where one of them is the top-selling pre-order on PS5 right now, which is something I can’t say I ever thought I’d see.
The game in question is Sea of Thieves, one of the four “shared” games in question that Microsoft recently announced. Currently, the $60 premium edition of the game is the #1 pre-order on PlayStation, ahead of The Show ’24, Battlefront Classic Collection and Dragon’s Dogma 2. Then, the $40 standard edition of Sea of Thieves is #5 on the list, ahead of another edition of The Show and Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. (Update: As I’m writing this it *just* swapped places with the $100 edition of The Show, thought that is available on both PS4 and PS5, while Sea of Thieves is only on the much-lower install base of the PS5).
That’s a pretty good performance for a 2018 game. Microsoft obviously wants to earn more revenue from the quasi-live game, but the main reason was supposedly to expand the playerbase and keep it healthy.
However, if we see Sea of Thieves do really well like this in terms of sales, you can imagine the gears turning in Microsoft’s head about how well much bigger games may sell on the platform. Obviously a persistent rumor here has been about Bethesda’s Starfield potentially coming to PlayStation, something that was neither announced nor ruled out completely. While Microsoft bragged about Starfield’s overall playercount at launch, one thing it did not have was big console sales, at least not as big as they could have been, given its inclusion in Game Pass on day one.
That could change in a big way if Starfield was released on PlayStation. It’s easy to imagine them moving millions of copies on PlayStation, and the fuss that some Xbox players may put up that it hopped consoles may be ignorable if it’s making lots of money and expanding its playerbase. In an era of massively expensive AAA games, yeah, if you can sell 5 million copies of Starfield on PlayStation for $70, you may want to do that. PlayStation obviously does not agree, and is offering none of their big expensive games on Xbox, but it’s clear Xbox wants to experiment.
For now, it’s just Sea of Thieves, but even that seems to be potentially acting as proof of concept here, if the game has this high or preorders ahead of its April 30 release date. Given what we’re seeing here, I am expecting these four games to just be the first of many to come.
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