In the UK, 96% of Dark Alliance’s Physical Sales Were on PS5, PS4

It’s not unusual to see the physical sales of new releases skew heavily in favour of PlayStation in the UK, but the emergence of Xbox Game Pass is making the splits ridiculous. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, which launched in Britain last week, generated 54 per cent of its boxed copy sales on PS5 and a further 42 per cent on PS4 – that’s 96 per cent in total.

It means that just four per cent of physical copies in the UK were sold on Xbox platforms, an unprecedented split between console families. It is worth reiterating that this reflects boxed sales only – there’s no digital data included here – and the game is included as part of Microsoft’s aforementioned Xbox Game Pass subscription. Reviews, also, have been mixed – although we thought it was pretty good.

Nevertheless, it’s perhaps a sign of things to come as Sony’s primary competitor continues to double down on subscriptions. There’s been some suggestion from the Team of Green that Xbox Game Pass actually increases software sales, and while this isolated example certainly doesn’t contradict that – well, it’s increasingly looking like physical sales may be dominated by PlayStation moving forwards.