Fantasy open-world adventure Crimson Desert is doing very well, by all available data. Developer and publisher Pearl Abyss announced this week that it has sold four million copies, bringing in what an analyst believes to be around $200 million and counting.
In the Alinea Insight newsletter (thanks, IGN), Rhys Elliot, Alinea's head of market analysis, looks at Crimson Desert's innings for March. The release has made $200 million in its first two weeks, Alinea Analytics estimates, with $75 million of that coming from PlayStation 5 sales alone. That's not all going straight to Pearl Abyss, due to cuts taken by various digital marketplaces such as Steam.
Despite the consensus on the game not being the strongest at first, it appears plenty are at least dipping their toes into all that Pywel has to offer. As an added point of statistical analysis, Elliot points out that Alinea's research suggests there's a 38% overlap between people who've played Crimson Desert and Dragon's Dogma 2, "significantly higher" than for the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Assassin's Creed Shadows.
People enjoy fantastical playgrounds that have a little bit of character to them, it seems. An accompanying chart shows where Crimson Desert lands in the top five selling games on PS5 and PS4, where it sits in third, ahead of Minecraft and MLB The Show 26, but behind FC 26 and Resident Evil Requiem.
Losing out to the biggest sports franchise in the world and a new Resident Evil fronted by Leon Kennedy is nothing to be ashamed of. According to those numbers, Crimson Desert's managed to sell one million copies on Sony hardware too, accounting for a whole quarter of the overall units sold.
After a rocky start, consistent updates have pushed the dragonfaring sandbox up in the eyes of many, with the Steam rating jumping up to Very Positive. We'll see what kind of wings the game has in the months ahead (after all, many players haven't even left the first region yet), but there are much worse ways the launch could've gone.
