Stellar Blade Tops April Charts, But It’s the Lowest Sales to Lead an April Since Prototype 2 [IGN]

Stellar Blade, the third-person action game by developer Shift Up, was the best-selling video game in the U.S. in April 2024.

Mat Piscatella, executive director of video games at Circana, noted in the latest report that Stellar Blade was the only new release in April 2024 that ranked “among the month’s top 20 best-selling premium video games,” beating out other new releases in April, such as Sand Land and Another Crab’s Treasure. Additional games that made the top 20 best-selling games for April 2024 include Helldivers 2, Fallout 4, and Tekken 8.

Piscatella further elaborated on the April 2024 report, explaining in a post on X/Twitter that although it was a great achievement for Stellar Blade to rank first in U.S. sales last month, “it did have the lowest sales to lead” since April 2012 when Radical Entertainment’s action-adventure game Prototype 2 secured the number one spot.

More interestingly, Piscatella wrote on X/Twitter that PS5 sales were trending ahead of PS4 but deduced that 2023 might have been the PS5’s “peak year” for sales in the United States. In contrast, the PS5’s competition, the Xbox Series X/S consoles, is trailing Xbox One by 13 percent, and both systems remain “slightly behind” the Xbox 360 in terms of U.S. sales.

Lots of chatter on PS5 sales today… in the US through each platform’s 41st month in market (March 2024 for PS5), PS5 unit sales are trending 7% ahead of PS4, and 66% ahead of PS3.

It is likely that 2023 was PS5’s peak year in the US.

Source: Circana Retail Tracking Service.

— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) May 14, 2024

The number for the PS5 is interesting. It comes nearly two weeks after Sony’s statistics revealed that half of PlayStation players have yet to upgrade from a PS4 to a PS5 console.

Nevertheless, despite Sony and Microsoft’s respective growing pains in terms of hardware sales, both companies are gearing up for new hardware. In the case of Sony, its rumored PS5 Pro had its hardware specs leaked online in March, with a report last month claiming that Sony told developers to prepare their games for the new hardware.

Microsoft, on the other hand, already revealed it is working on a next-generation gaming console that touts will be the “largest technical leap” in a game console generation. However, before Microsoft released this next-generation Xbox system, a leak from last year revealed that the company plans to launch mid-cycle refreshes of the Xbox Series X and S sometime in 2024.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.