Ghost of Yotei has been on store shelves for four weeks at the time of this writing, and in its first three out of those four, according to a new report from Alinea Analytics, Ghost of Yotei has already beaten Assassin's Creed Shadows sales on PS5.
Assassin's Creed Shadows had a great launch when it arrived in March 2025. It led software sales in the US for the month, it hit over 5 million units sold by the summer, and was the best-selling game in Europe for 2025 as of this past August. It has undoubtedly done well from a commercial standpoint, but for anyone who follows video game sales, when it comes to Shadows, the question has been how it would fare against Ghost of Yotei.
The games share a setting, and they even share a very similar plot, with both stories being about the protagonists taking revenge on six killers by cutting a violent path to them across a large open world. The list of similarities between them is longer than the list of their differences, so it was interesting to see which of the two would come out on top on the sales charts.
Per Alinea Analytics, Assassin's Creed Shadows has, to date, sold 2.4 million copies on PS5. In just its first three weeks on the market, Ghost of Yotei has hit 2.5 million copies sold on PS5.
The report delves into some of the factors at play as to why Yotei surpassed Shadows in such a short time, like how many of the sales came from PlayStation players who commonly buy first-party PlayStation titles, and how Sucker Punch already had a stellar open world game set in Japan five years ago when Ghost of Tsushima launched, so there was already a base of fans looking forward to the sequel.
Yes, Assassin's Creed fans have been waiting for the series to go to Japan since after the first game in 2007, but that itch was first scratched and satisfied by Ghost of Tsushima, and it did so while refining many of the tired methods and formulas that Ubisoft puts into all of its open-world games.
Since Shadows is a multiplatform game that's also reportedly set to arrive on Nintendo Switch 2, and Yotei is a game that'll only be available on PS5 and eventually PC, it'll likely be a different story when it comes to whether Yotei will eclipse Shadows in terms of total sales. But on the stage where it really mattered for Yotei, which is on PlayStation consoles, it quickly settled its anticipated bout with Shadows.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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