CD Projekt has revealed some unusual detailed sales stats for The Witcher 3, including the surprising fact that it’s more popular in Asia than America.
Publishers almost never release sales figures for their games. Some do when it comes to their quarterly financial reports, but most go out of their way to keep the information secret and often we can only guess at how well a game really did.
But with The Witcher 3 we know exactly, it’s sold a grand total of 28.3 million copies since it first came out in May 2019.
But while publisher CD Projekt didn’t seem to want to go into any more detail than that, a fan on Twitter has found that by examining the chart below in detail you can actually tell exactly how many copies it’s sold on each format.
The figures break down roughly as follows, although bear in mind that the series started off as a PC exclusive, which explains why it’s so popular on that format, and the Nintendo Switch version only came out last October.
PC: 12 million
PlayStation 4: 10.8 million
Xbox One: 4.3 million
Nintendo Switch: 0.7 million
What’s also interesting, from the same financial report, is the breakdown between physical and digital sales, which is something else that publishers tend to keep secret.
Digital sales started off as 29% of total sales in 2015 but had risen to 82% by 2019. Without other games comes to compare with it’s hard to say how typical that is of more recent releases though.
What is also interesting is how much sales rose in 2019, clearly as a result of The Witcher show on Netflix.
The final set of stats is where in the world the game was most popular, with Europe taking a clear lead with 37.2% and Asia in second place with 27.9%. That means that surprisingly North America only accounted for 25.6% of all sales of the game.
Whether CD Projekt’s next game, Cyberpunk 2077, will prove proportionally more popular in the US remains to be seen but they’ve already said that a fourth The Witcher game is coming at some point in the future, even if it doesn’t necessarily star Geralt as the main protagonist.
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