Feb 2024 USA Sales: Helldivers 2 Kills It as 2024's Best-Selling Game So Far

Word of mouth still counts for something. I don’t see any of the other live services Sony are making taking off like this as it essentially comes down to luck and being in the right place at the right time.

Game night end up being in the top 3 for the year. It definitely deserving, most fun I ever had in multiplayer.

Crazy that skull and bones beat suicide squad.

Hogwarts Legacy in the top 10 best sellers this year is crazy to me

@nessisonett The game actually being really fun and reasonably priced helps as well.

Impressive showing from Rebirth especially from only 1 day of sales.

@Ralizah I’d love to see Sony realise that the price of Helldivers and the dev cycle is way more justifiable than every game being a new GTA in terms of scope and resources. It’ll never happen. In the meantime, I’ll just be addicted to Balatro and Vampire Survivors or playing PS2 games in my backlog. It’s not like it’s the Switch, where you have to pay full price, sales are there for a reason!

So FF rebirth manages to be 4th best selling game of 2024 BASED ON ONE DAYS SALES?
Yet this site continues to spread the fud that its sales are poor?
I have a lot of time for this site, but there are more than one staff writer here who has shown clearly they have lost perspective and push unproven biased narritives regularly. In contrast Ive read several contributions from newer writers here who have a much healthier love for gaming and should definitely be the future of articles here.

Helldivers 2 is a well deserved winner in sales, and its a delight to see a game doing so well from word of mouth, with sales rising in succesive weeks..

Congratulations to both HellDivers 2 and FF7 ReBirth, seems both have seen great success and deservably so.

You'd have to pay me to play an online only live service game, and the pay would have to be decent too, at least £50ph.

Plus free private healthcare.

Suicide Squad lost out to Skull and Bones despite the earlier release???!!!
Ouch... that really has to hurt.

@Titntin To be fair, I'm not sure you can take the #4 slot on that list as overwhelming success when the total market failure that is Suicide Squad is #5. That's like a list highlighting a game had a faster development cycle than Duke Nukem Forever.

I don't think Rebirth sold "poorly" or "failed" but I don't think it came close to performing as Square or Sony expected or wanted from it, or where you'd want a big new FF game to place (Of course nothing performs the way Square wants. ) Come December HD2 will still be in top 10 lists. I don't suspect Rebirth will be. And Hogwats is there over a year later. That's some staying power.

But Rebirth might chart again when the 3rd installment comes out (or a trilogy bundle.) Splitting it into 3 was always going to make it a mess in sales data.

@nessisonett @Ralizah Yeah the obvious factors in a GaaS success is mostly down to luck and random chance good timing, where it goes viral, and when something goes viral everyone, particularly in younger demographics, wants to be included.

But I honestly think HD2 more than anything is a case study in market pricing. If HD2 were $70 or F2P with recurring fees, I don't think it would have half the success it is. The price is right AND it went viral = big success.

There's also the factor that it's primarily a PC game with PC accounting for the lions share of its sales, and is a game that's squarely in the PC market's main wheelhouse vs. most console type genres, while also not being a graphics tech demo that chugs without a 4080.

@NEStalgia @nessisonett It's pretty much the opposite philosophy that other developers are going for. Control your budget and launch a fun game for a reasonable price vs. inflating your budgets and jacking up the MSRP to help compensate. I definitely hope this signals to Sony that they need to change course (although the dialogue around SM2 is already headed in that direction, along with the admission that despite record revenues, margins are razor thin).

I definitely hope they shift away from this need to make everything a hardware-busting blockbuster. I mean, you can still have those. You should. Have your Uncharteds and Zeldas that show off the true capabilities of the hardware they're on. But... not everything needs to be that. Games can have a smaller scope and still be incredibly fun. Nintendo gets this, and most of their games are made on fairly manageable budgets. Sony used to get this before all of their developers decided they wanted to ape the Naughty Dog approach to game development.

@nessisonett I agree, I just worry Sony will read it as 8 years of dev time and rebooting it at some point only helped the cause and claim we should take our time with games! I also wonder if they cancelled something like Factions prematurely, and if it would have been different had HD2 released before cancelling the project. Might have seen it as a chance to release $40 factions and watch people devour it (I would play it at that price as I loved the first go round).

@Ralizah With the way most gaming execs think these days, I'm betting the industry take-away from HD2 is that if cheaper sells than F2P must be the future and we go right back to 2011. The industry is run by all or nothing pinheads that see everything must be either the most expensive and ambitious production ever attempted or must be an unlimited milked gatcha and rake in shedloads and there's nothing between.

Agreed, though, exactly what I liked about Sony was that philosophy and I'll honestly always dislike Naughty Dog because I blame Sony's obsession with the cinematic game, and death of their many smaller, fun games, on ND's "success." (Plus ND was never a good dev....a platformer you run at the screen?! )

@Ralizah too many games look to see what they can add what they should be seeing what they can cut.
For budget and for game quality. Many games for example would have made the ship in Helldivers 2 far too big and with stuff far apart, spending more money on making it and pushing up the budget.
The game is both better and cheaper for keeping it so small and concise.
"content" in some ways has become a terrible buzzword.

@NEStalgia lolol

You run toward the screen in those chase levels, forcing you to memorize the location of obstacles. The levels are all LITERAL hallways. What bugs me most, though, is how the camera is positioned in exactly the wrong spot where it makes judging the distance of your jumps difficult.

Despite all this, I had a lot of fun with Crash Bandicoot 2 recently when I 100%ed the collection (except the original, because that game is the exact antithesis of fun and is designed to make people suffer unnecessarily). They took the broken game design of this series and somehow managed to make it work.

Warped had the audacity to add in vehicle levels with the world's most unresponsive motorcycle, UGH

@Jaz007 Yup. This 'bigger is better' mentality is killing Western AAA gaming. Probably explains why everything needs to be an open world action adventure with rpg elements now. And, if Sony makes it, cost 300 million dollars.

Developers need to learn to focus on the elements that players actually care about. I don't want to wait six years and pay $70 for a game because you feel the need to hire an entire 20-person team to model the photorealistic dimples on someone's face.

I believe these charts go up to the 2nd of march(since NPD uses rotating 4 week and 5 week months rather than calendar months). So for Rebirth it would be 3 days.

@Titntin I love beef. @ them! Say it with your chest!!

@Professor_Niggle Lol 😁

@Ralizah ND made one game that was actually excellent in it's genre: Jak1. Before that was the broken Crash and after that they just wanted to make movies with some inputs. And somehow that sold well and the whole industry, especially Sony decided that's the golden ticket but to make it work they need to spend more on it than actual movies. Then ND just started making actual movies instead. Lol. (Seriously, one TV show, 1 movie, 0 games since PS5 😆).

Speaking of budgets and dimples ND was the poster child of that with fruit physics in ltou2. It's a zombie revenge torture porn game. Wtf cares about each piece of fruit accurately rolling around? I think the language barrier between Japan and California causes this. They heard Tecmo Koei spending years on jiggle physics for "melons" and thought they needed accurate cantaloupe rolling for their game.

I just bought helldivers. It said can't establish netwrok connection. I thought the server issue is now fixed?

@mrbone that doesn't come up for me. I haven't seen that since the 2nd or 3rd week of it's release

@NEStalgia I think it's fine for Naughty Dog to be that way, since they're the OG when it comes to modern cinematic blockbuster action spectacles. Go ahead and spend a year modeling fruit.

But why does EVERYTHING need to be Uncharted now?

Meanwhile, Nintendo is happily dropping games across a half-dozen different genres every year. They may not score as well as Sony's TGA bait, but it's sure nice to have a diverse selection of exclusive titles to choose from.

I wrote Sony off after they nuked Japan Studio, which indicated to me that the Sony I grew up loving was dead and gone, and that the changes to the brand were irreversible. I still like the Horizon games and some of their third-party exclusives, but thankfully I don't need to invest in new hardware to play those, as they eventually just go to PC as well.

@Ralizah Like you, Horizon is the only one of their modern stable that I'm really into. And, darnit, Squaresoft exlusivity. And like you the Japan studio kind of Sony games are the ones I bought PS's for. GoW is their poster child now and my consistent takeaway of that series is "it's okay I guess." TLG, Ico, Gravity Rush, even Jak (credit to ND here), LBP, that's what I loved PS for. Right now it's my VR box + Squaresoft. I'm using it basically for VR and Fist of the North Star catching up on PS4 backlog atm

I both want them to revive Gravity Rush (which is one of my favorite franchises of all time on any platform), and kind of dread it. Because i know if they reboot it it will come from some European or Californian studio, Kat will be some Marvel stereotype girl-power token on a mission to prove something rather than a wandering clueless girl just trying to figure out what's what and helping without thinking. Raven will be a dominatrix biker chick with a blue hedgehog attitude problem, Cid will be gone, slice of life quests will definitely be gone, Nevi will pour buckets of blood, effing fruit will be effing physics-perfect, and it'll probably auto-correct the camera to always be upright and auto-guide you to mount points to land on. You'll spend twelve minutes flying over water to get to the next waypoint, and it'll run at 15fps, but by gawd that water will have perfect reflections!

@Professor_Niggle I am living in a temporary accommodation, and I don't know if it is because its internet connection is slow. Mobile hotspots can't connect either.

Unsure why everyone is angry about the FF rebirth reporting on this website.

We are almost done with March and all reported sales so far support the conclusion that the vast majority of FF7 Rebirth copies sold to date were sold on or before the March 2, 2024 end date of the reporting. There is nothing shown that sales in the 20 days since come close to matching that first week.

Which makes sense. AAA RPGs are most often picked up either immediately or sales spikes later on in much smaller volumes whenever the game is discounted.

@NEStalgia Gravity Rush is better off dead without the original development studio to make it. I don't want to see them 'Weekend at Bernie's' it and end up destroying its legacy like when Konami handed off the Silent Hill IP to random Western developers.

Ironic that the same dude created both series!

@Titntin
I think the reporting has been more in terms of Japanese sales. How Rebirth sells in North America and Europe will tell the whole story. Good to see it got off to a strong start in NA and hopefully that continues.

@Ralizah Yeah. I don't want to agree but I kind of have to agree. Not only is GR VERY Japanese at heart, but Toyama specifically managed to give it that weird mix of lighthearted frivolity + seriously disturbing without anything graphic.

I want more of it. I need more of it. But I don't see how more of it could exist unless it's at least made by serious fans of the original that aren't trying to reinvent it, or, worse, make it more marketable. I can't even think of other Japanese studios that could really give it the right weirdness factor that makes it special. Maybe Fromsoft in a weird way.

Can't imagine how the theatrical show will go down.... That's scarier than anything Silent Hill.

@StrickenBiged To be fair, the Deluxe Edition of Suicide Squad came out on January 30th and it came in 3rd for sales that month with just two days on sale. Seems like most of the people who bought the game bought that edition for the early access and other bonuses.

If Rebirth does not sell well, we will probably no longer have other 3A level JRPGs in the future. I bought both a digital and a physical copy. Shame on the JRPG fans.

@mrbone I would think that's the reason. Try doing a speed check in the Network Settings and see what comes up

@Nowings FF16, Infinite Wealth, and Sea of Stars sold well.

P3R did well too.

To your point though, maybe the problem is a AAAA budget where 30% of the console’s owner base needs to buy the game for it to make a huge profit. That is an unsustainable baseline.

And no, consumers are not obligated to pay $69.99 pretax for every game in their preferred genre. To boot, FF7R is the least JRPG-like game in the series in a long time. Its like Ezio Auditore got sucked into a gigantic Mario Party match.