First week sales at retail show that Dead Rising 4 has outsold the Last Guardian at retail across the UK. This result excludes digital for both titles but shows a big chart win for Microsoft with The Last Guardian failing to break the top 5 list. Sony still struggling with their 1st party software lineup despite long over due release of this game.
Dead Rising 4 beat The Last Guardian in sales
It’ll be interesting to see which one will have the longer tail in sales. We imagine Dead Rising 4 sales will fall off more dramatically than The Last Guardian. Both titles did OK getting to 5th and 7th, that’s always good to see. Looking at that Dead Rising 4 footage, it still surprises us how good it looks, especially for a launch title. What’s more, we wish we get an upgrade update for performance once Project Scorpio comes out. It would be great for both Sony & Capcom. Since they could sell the game again as a part of a two-pack, with Dead Rising 3 & 4.
The Last Guardian is very obviously a niche art-house prestige title with a very limited audience and almost no marketing. People who really appreciate slow, delicate storytelling and games as works of art will love it. But like other titles in that vein like Journey, The Witness, Fez, etc it was never supposed to be a commercial hit AAA game. Dead Rising, on the other hand, is a totally mainstream beat ’em up with incredibly broad appeal and more of a superficial “fun factor.”
It’s more fair comparing The Last Guardian to something like Ori and the Blind Forest or The Witness. It’s outsold the last two games’ first weeks, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, by wide margins. And both those games got sequels (at least spiritual sequels), so by Ueda’s own standards it’s doing very well.