A 77 on Metacritic, QTE clips mocked online before the game even came out, and 1.9 million copies sold in three days. Wolverine sales tell a different story than the noise surrounding Insomniac’s game, released September 15, 2026 on PS5. The figure comes from analytics firm Alinea Analytics, which published it on September 18. It deserves a close read, because it says precise things about who’s buying, at what price, and in which country.
What Alinea measures, and what it doesn’t
The title of Rhys Elliott’s analysis sets the tone: « Wolverine sells 1.9M, despite the online mauling. » The details come down to four numbers. 1.9 million copies sold to players as of September 17. $130 million in revenue. One million digital pre-orders logged before launch. And 22.9% of revenue came from physical copies.
These Wolverine sales figures are estimates, not numbers from Sony. Alinea notes they exclude unsold boxes still on shelves, which publishers happily count in their own announcements. The figure is therefore fairly conservative. On Wolf’s Gaming Blog, Baden Ronie ran the calculation the firm doesn’t: at the average price, the physical share would work out to roughly 435,000 discs. A notable volume, just as Sony argues before a judge that a digital game buyer owns nothing.
PlayStation Studios’ second-best launch in three years
Over at Kotaku, Ethan Gach picked up Alinea’s comparisons over the same three-day window. Only one PlayStation Studios game did better over the period the firm covers, and it’s Insomniac’s other Marvel license.
| Game | Estimated three-day revenue |
|---|---|
| Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 | $250M |
| Marvel’s Wolverine | $130M |
| Ghost of Yōtei | $121.9M |
| Death Stranding 2 | $51.7M |
| Astro Bot | $34.6M |
| Stellar Blade | $32.7M |
| Helldivers 2 | $18.9M |
Rhys Elliott sums up the situation in one line: « Wolverine is now the #6 top-grossing PS5 game of the year, despite only being on the market for a few days. » Ahead of it in 2026: Resident Evil Requiem ($231M), 007 First Light ($199M), 2K27 ($164M), Crimson Desert ($160M) and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced ($133M). All of them have weeks or months of a head start.
In that subtitle, the last three words matter. Wolverine sales reflect a launch weekend, and an annual ranking plays out over months.
A 77 that barely matters against 900,000 buyers
The game sits at 77 on Metacritic. According to Alinea, that’s Insomniac’s lowest score for a non-DLC release in over ten years. The complaints are familiar: QTEs, those sequences where you just press the button shown on screen, omnipresent objective markers, and heavily scripted sections. Clips of it went viral on social media.
Yet the timeline of Wolverine sales weakens the idea of a rejection. Elliott notes: « Most of the viral criticism came before the street date. » One million copies were pre-ordered. The other 900,000 were bought after the reviews and after the backlash. On the PS Store, iXBT Games noted on September 16 a rating of 4.85 out of 5 from 15,589 votes, 92% of them five stars.
That rating has an obvious limit: only people who paid for the game get to vote. Alinea’s other data point sheds better light on the phenomenon. 82% of Wolverine players had already played Insomniac’s first Spider-Man, 70% had played Spider-Man 2. The audience was already won over before the first review, and much of that audience doesn’t follow any online controversy.
In France: 5% of players, and a game at €79.99
The United States accounts for 53% of players, the UK 7%, France 5%, Canada 4%. Applied to 1.9 million copies, the French market would work out to roughly 95,000 copies. That’s our calculation, not Alinea’s, and it assumes sales follow the same split as players.
More telling is the price table the firm published. The game costs $69.99 in the United States and €79.99 in the eurozone, or $91.84 at the exchange rate used: 31.2% more. The UK pays 33.8% more. Conversely, India pays 25.5% less and Japan 17.6% less.
The gap needs a clarification the table doesn’t give. The US price is shown before tax, the European price with all taxes included. Once the 20% French VAT is stripped out, the €79.99 drops to €66.66, around $76.50. The real difference with the United States is therefore about 9%, not 31%. It still works against the European player, just like the consoles themselves.
What three days of Wolverine sales don’t tell you
A launch measures anticipation, not satisfaction. Pre-orders and Insomniac’s loyal fanbase explain most of these three days. What comes next will depend on word of mouth, and that’s where a 77 can cost you: Spider-Man 2 launched almost twice as strong, at $250 million.
Sony hasn’t released any figures. As long as that remains the case, everything we know about Wolverine sales rests on one firm’s model. We wrote before launch that the game had given up on an open world. The heavily scripted sections that social media criticizes it for partly stem from that. Buyers in the first three days didn’t factor that in. Those buying next month will have read the early reviews.
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