Saros' claims of low sales are looking increasingly likely

Saros doesn't seem to have been a slam-dunk commercially, despite high marks from reviewers and plenty of good words from the general player base. Alinea Analytics pegged the sequel to Housemarque's Returnal at around 300,000 launch copies, the kind of start that could mean the game won't even recoup its investment in the end. Things got complicated when industry insider Jeff Grubb came out in overall favor of Aliney last week, further cementing the likelihood of those estimates.

We now have our first look at actual, albeit purely graphics-driven, data points for Saros' release window in the United States – the game's largest market and the main representative for much of the West. It doesn't look great.

Number nine

For the period between April 5 and May 2, which includes Saros' first three days on the market, the game only managed to grab ninth place overall. That puts her behind even Bethesda's seemingly somewhat subdued PlayStation 5 relaunch of 2023's Starfield, though there's one caveat worth considering: Starfield came out on PS5 on April 7, so she had a full month's worth of data here.

It's impossible to say without seeing the raw numbers themselves – which are strictly confidential in US news – but there's a real chance that Saros would be ahead of Starfield if we had more than just the first big spike in sales. But the earliest sales are likely to be the strongest, so don't take this as a learning curve nothing by comparison.

In better news, Capcom's new IP, Pragmata, took second place. Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream won first place. This game was destined to do gangbusters in Japan, but I wasn't sure if it would rise to the top in the United States. Now we have the answer. There's no doubt that the Nintendo Switch 2, supported in part by Tomodachi Life, was the best-selling piece of hardware in that time period.