According to Sony, God of War: Ragnarok has sold more copies in its debut week than any other first-party PlayStation title. Coming up against some stiff competition with the likes of The Last of Us Part II, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Ragnarok’s predecessor, God of War (2018) all being very popular games. Sony says that Ragnarok has sold 5.1 million copies during its first week.
Read: Amazon will spend $1 billion per year on theatre releases
The game was released on November 9th, and the action-adventure epic has become a commercial and critical favourite. Based on 135 critic reviews on Metacritic, God of War: Ragnarok currently holds a 94 percent score.
Comparing sales with past Sony exclusives isn’t always apples-to-apples. The company has used various periods of time for different games, presumably to fit the moment’s PR needs. For example, it announced first-three-days sales for The Last of Us Part II (four million in 2020), Marvel’s Spider-Man (3.3 million in 2018) and God of War (3.1 million in 2018). However, Ragnarok’s first-week sales nearly doubled those of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, which sold 2.7 million during its first week in 2016.
Created by Santa Monica Studios, game director Eric Williams claimed the weeks leading up to God of War Ragnarök’s release placed overwhelming pressure on the development team. Williams claimed developers were still panicking over the state of the sequel just three months before its intended release date, with some members even casting doubt on the overall quality of God of War Ragnarök. The director additionally likened his experience in developing the sequel to climbing Mount Everest and claimed he needed to continue building on Ragnarök’s success, which was a desire that he believed other developers shared.
Williams also previously explained the development team’s creative vision for God of War Ragnarök, with the director claiming they focused on perfecting the God of War formula rather than evolving the series as a whole. “Sequels are not always going to be as major a step,” Williams said. “They’re going to be refined, and they’re going to be a continuation — especially in the story space. It would have taken us forever to rebuild the whole game and then take on that story. If you liked the reboot, we’ll give you that again, but we’re going to do a lot more refining.”
