Wolverine sells 1.9 million in three days - and more than a fifth of the money still came from boxes

A week of memes and lukewarm reviews, and the result? According to an estimate from Rhys Elliott at Alinea Analytics, Marvel's Wolverine moved around 1.9 million copies on PS5 in its first three days and has brought in upwards of 130 million dollars. About a million of those were digital pre-orders, locked in before a single review went live.

That last bit is the honest explanation for why the discourse didn't hurt. Half the launch was sold before anyone knew whether the game was good. You can't meme your way out of a pre-order that's already been charged. If you wanted proof that review scores matter less for big licensed games than the internet likes to think, here it is - Insomniac plus a Marvel name is a purchase people make months ahead.

But the figure that caught my eye is the other one. By Alinea's estimate, more than a fifth of launch revenue - 22.9 percent - came from discs. That's a share of the money, not a head count. If you assume a disc and a digital copy cost roughly the same, my own back-of-the-envelope guess is somewhere around 400,000 boxes in three days - a guess, not a reported figure. And this is a first-party Sony game, on a platform whose owner announced on the PlayStation Blog on 1 July that physical disc production ends in January 2028 for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles - not just Sony's own, everybody's. Games released before then stay on disc.

A bit over twenty percent sounds small until you remember what kind of twenty percent it is. It's money from people who lend the game to a friend, who sell it on when they're done, who wait for a used copy at half price. In our region that isn't nostalgia, it's budgeting. A full-price PS5 game is a serious chunk of a monthly pay packet here, and the disc is the only version of that purchase you can get some money back from. A digital copy of a divisive game is a sunk cost. A disc of a divisive game is something you can pass on next weekend if the reviews turn out to be right.

And that's exactly why I'd be careful with this particular game. Mixed word of mouth plus a strong launch usually means one thing a few weeks later: a lot of second-hand copies and the first discounts. If you weren't among the million who pre-ordered, you lose nothing by waiting.

One caveat - these are analyst estimates, not Sony's own numbers, so treat the decimals loosely. The direction is clear enough, though. Sony is planning to walk away, for every new game on its consoles, from a format that just brought in more than a fifth of this launch's money, at full price, in the first three days. I'd love to hear the business case for deciding that revenue is the wrong shape.

Image: Nicholas / CC BY 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Retro_gaming_shop_in_Akihabara,_Japan.jpg