ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

Far Cry 5 ends PUBG's reign at Steam No.1 spot - sold twice as many copies last week

Far Cry 5 ends PUBG's reign at Steam No.1 spot - sold twice as many copies last week

Battle royale behemoth Playerunknown's Battlegrounds has dominated the Steam charts for the last year, but for the first time in since it took the No.1 spot, the title has been forced into second place.

Ubisoft's latest title Far Cry 5 has outsold the blockbuster, selling 540,494 copies for the week ending April 1st, going by data from SteamSpy. By comparison, PUBG sold 247,364 copies. Of course, this being SteamSpy data, it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The numbers for Far Cry 5 will be higher, too, given that SteamSpy doesn't count sales made via Ubisoft's own Uplay service. The Steam sales figures follow pre-orders for the game being the fourth most-purchased item on Valve's storefront the week before

It's unlikely that Far Cry 5 will remain ahead of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds for longer than a week, but that any game can beat PUBG Corp's blockbuster is an impressive feat.

As well as the hype around Far Cry 5, this is likely driven by the fact that Playerunknown's Battlegrounds has been out for a year now, and sales are of course going to decelerate over time; PUBG was simply never going to maintain the upward trajectory it was on in its first year forever. Not that developer and publisher PUBG Corp needs to be particularly worried, with the game having sold well over 30m copies on PC alone since its March 2017 release.

The game is facing increased competition in the battle royale space, with Epic's Fortnite being a particularly big - and, importantly, free - contender.

Overall, it's fair to say that Far Cry 5 has been something of a smash hit. Over in the UK retail charts, the game has had the biggest launch in the franchise to date. Though the game has reviewed positively, it has faced criticism for not doing much with its politically-charged setting.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.