Resident Evil Village enjoys 2nd biggest physical launch of 2021 in the UK

Resident Evil: Village has recorded the second biggest physical launch week of 2021 in the UK, behind only Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury.

According to boxed sales data from GfK Entertainment published on GamesIndustry.biz, the new UK No.1 achieved 49% of its sales on PS5, 31% on PS4 and 20% on Xbox.

Capcom’s horror title had the third biggest PS5 game launch behind Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and it is the seventh biggest PS5 game based on first week sales alone. The top six are Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Demon’s Souls, Watch Dogs Legion and Sackboy: A Big Adventure.

Only Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has enjoyed a better opening week for a boxed Xbox Series X/S game, and Resident Evil Village is No.3 on the all-time best-seller list for Microsoft’s next-gen consoles, behind Activision’s shooter and Immortals Fenyx Rising.

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While the game’s launch week sales were 76% higher than those achieved by April 2020’s Resident Evil 3 Remake, they were down 25% compared to January 2019’s Resident Evil 2: Remake and nearly 40% compared to January 2017’s Resident Evil 7.

Fairer comparisons will be able to be drawn when digital sale data for the game is made available. Data suggests two-thirds of games sold in the UK last year were purchased digitally, up 74% over 2019.

Resident Evil Village also enjoyed a strong debut on PC, smashing the series’ record for concurrent players on Steam.

On Friday, the Capcom title debuted with a peak concurrent player count of 101,726. As noted by Eurogamer, this is significantly higher than Resident Evil 2’s 74,024 peak, and over five times more than Resident Evil 7’s 18,211, according to SteamCharts.

Capcom has said it hopes Village will surpass Resident Evil 7’s 8.5 million sales to become the best-selling individual title in the series.

“Our main ambition for this year, although there’s so much going on at the same time, is to make sure Resident Evil: Village will be the best-performing Resident Evil title, both in terms of quality as well as business,” Capcom’s EMEA marketing director Antoine Molant told GI.biz in March.

VGC’s Resident Evil Village review calls the game “a deliciously hammy hybrid of past glories, with some real series highs”.