Even with everything going on in 2020, video games continue to be sold digitally to consumers and the latest reports for digital sales show that Horizon Zero Dawn sold over 700K copies for PC upon its release. So much so, that the game had nearly reached the records for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's initial unit sales for PC.
These sales details for Horizon Zero Dawn come from reports on the digital earnings released by SuperData, a provider for data on the digital gaming marketplace. Based on SuperData’s analysis, digital game earnings have seen a 13% increase in 2020, so far totaling $82.8 billion with August accumulating $10.8 billion that month from new and familiar titles. While Horizon didn't make it to the top ten in sales for PC, it was popular with PC players and accomplished a noticeable achievement in its release month.
Horizon Zero Dawn sold 716K units for the PC on its initial release, and it was close to reaching the records of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s several million copies at launch in May 2015. The report mentioned the game exceeds the sales of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey and managed to past Death Stranding’s PC sales of 477K units. This shows that Sony's exploration of adding PS4 exclusives to PC has some merit to it through the sales.
Sony's exploration of porting Horizon to PC has certainly turned a profit, based on the report, and may add more consideration to the idea of bringing more exclusives to PC. There was certainly some pushback to the idea from some PlayStation players before and after Horizon was released for PC, partly due to the frequent crash issues. However, the developers Guerrilla Games were able to fix the issues and help it maintain success as reflected in the reports.
This isn’t the first time that Sony experimented with cross-platform playability in recent years. The company tested the waters with cross-play through its subscription service PlayStation Now in 2019, where it allowed PC players to stream major exclusives as God of War and several others for a limited time until January 2, 2020. This falls in line with the company's 2020 corporate report to explore the new opportunity this offers for increasing player accessibility with its games.
This subject is not new for PlayStation that goes back a couple of years to 2018, when Sony dabbled in cross-play with Fortnite to an extent. Earlier in 2020, Sony’s Worldwide studios boss Hermen Hulst stated that the company will keep supporting PlayStation first-party games, but it is working to bring some of its games over to PC. With Horizon Zero Dawn selling as many copies as it did, Sony may keep that door open for the foreseeable future.
Source: SuperData