I’d never touched a Nioh game before Nioh 3, but after how much I enjoyed Team Ninja’s latest stance-switching soulslike, I regret not giving the series my attention sooner. Evidently I’m not alone in having Nioh 3 as my entry point, as Koei Tecmo has announced in a short blog post that it’s already “surpassed one million units sold worldwide, becoming the fastest-selling entry in the series’ history”.
For context, Nioh 2 launched in March 2020 and took over a year to sell two million copies across all platforms (not helped by its delayed PC launch almost a year later), so its successor is well on track to beat that milestone too. I’d also be remiss not to point out that Nioh 3 isn’t even available on Xbox yet—it’s a six-month PS5 console exclusive. Though with the state of Microsoft’s console, I’m not sure that quite evens it out.
Watch On
Nevertheless, after an extraordinarily generous demo (it’s quite literally about the first 10 hours of the game, so go hog wild) and very positive reviews, I’m not surprised to see Nioh 3 doing so well right off the rip.
Nioh 3 immediately toppled the series’s previous peak player record on Steam, a title held by Nioh 2’s Complete Edition when it finally launched on PC almost a year after its console counterparts. Nioh 3 continued to grow over the launch weekend until it reached a peak of over 88,000 concurrents on Steam alone.
As a result of Nioh 3’s strong launch, Koei Tecmo also revealed that the entire series combined has now sold over 10 million copies globally, which is a pretty impressive number for an unforgiving soulslike with more button combos than I can fit in my brain.
With the success of Nioh 3 and the series as a whole, and a stellar 90 from us in our Nioh 3 review, I’m hoping we’ll get another sequel that capitalises even more on the wacky, pseudo-historical world Team Ninja has built. In the meantime, can I at least get some more background music, please? There’s a lot to explore but I’ve been losing it hearing the same track on repeat.
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