PlayStation’s PC efforts are paying off, if the latest U.S. Video Game Market Highlights report from analyst group Circana is any indication. That’s because developer Sucker Punch Production’s Ghost of Tsushima, which originally launched on PlayStation 4 back in 2020, was the best-selling game of May 2024 in the U.S. And that’s almost assuredly due to the recent PC release of Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut on May 16.
Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut hit PC almost four years after the game’s initial launch on PS4, which speaks to PlayStation’s PC release strategy it detailed last month. It said its live-service games, like this year’s Helldivers 2 or the upcoming 5v5 hero shooter Concord, will launch day-and-date on PC, but its tentpole single-player games, like Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut and God of War Ragnarök (hitting PC this September), will launch at later dates.
The rest of the top 10 for May 2024 looks like this:
- Ghost of Tsushima
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III
- Helldivers II
- MLB: The Show 24
- Sea of Thieves
- Minecraft
- Elden Ring
- Hogwarts Legacy
- Stellar Blade
And here’s what the top 20 best-selling games of the entire year look like:
Year-to-Date Ending May 2024 Top 20 Best-Selling Premium Games – U.S. (Dollar Sales, Physical and Digital from digital data sharing publishers, excludes add-on content) pic.twitter.com/Wnacwg4ixw
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) July 8, 2024
For May 2024, content spending fell 3% compared to May 2023, down to $3.6 billion, even despite a 13% growth in mobile content spending. However, that 13% increase in mobile spending was offset heavily by a 40% drop in console content spending, according to Circana executive director Mat Piscatella. He attributes the May 2024 console spending decline (compared to May 2023) to the strength of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s launch last year.
Elsehwere in the report, Piscatella says video game hardware spending declined 40% as well when compared to May 2023, down to $202 million. “Through May, all current generation hardware platforms are showing double-digit percentage declines year-on-year in 2024, with Switch showing the most significant drop,” Piscatella writes on X (formerly Twitter).
The PlayStation 5 led May 2024’s hardware market in unit and dollar sales, with the Switch in second for unit sales and the Xbox Series X/S in second for dollar sales. Throughout each console’s 43 months on the market, the PS5 is up by 8% compared to the PS4 and the Xbox Series X/S is down 13% compared to the Xbox One.
May spending on video game accessories dropped 8% when comparing May 2024 to May of last year, and the PlayStation Portal was the best-selling accessory in dollar sales for the month – it’s also the best-selling accessory for the entire year.
For more, be sure to check out the entire Circana report here. After that, read Game Informer’s Ghost of Tsushima review, and then check out this video for a look at how Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut runs on Steam Deck.
Have you been playing Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut on PC? Let us know in the comments below!