Hard sales data is hard to come by in gaming. Companies occasionally highlight success stories and regional reports can shed light on relative sales rankings, but otherwise it’s hard to get a good picture of things. New sales estimates from Alinea Analytics aim to fill in some of the blanks, specifically regarding how Microsoft exclusives ported to PlayStation 5 have been performing.
The list published on Wednesday includes 13 games believed to have sold over 100,000 copies each on PlayStation 5 since arriving there. The report doesn’t include Call of Duty or certain legacy games that were developed for PS5 before they were acquired by Microsoft. Perennial best-sellers like Minecraft were also left out of this analysis. Instead, the estimates focus on the more narrow question of how financially lucrative Microsoft’s recent multiplatform push has been and which games in particular have performed well on rival hardware.
Here are the 13 top performers among games ported in the last two years.
- Forza Horizon 5 – 5.8 million
- Sea of Thieves – 2.7 million
- Oblivion Remastered – 1.2 million
- Grounded – 770K
- Gears of War: Reloaded – 684K
- Doom: The Dark Ages – 567K
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – 537K
- Ninja Gaiden 4 – 262K
- Microsoft Flight Simulator – 252K
- Starfield – 207K
- Age of Empires 2 Remastered – 173K
- The Outer Worlds 2 – 163K
- Age of Mytholoy Retold – 123K
Here's some Xbox games that sold over 100K copies on PlayStation (@alineaanalytics estimates).
Thirteen first-party Xbox titles have now cleared the 100K unit milestone on PlayStation. Collectively, they’ve generated $667M in gross revenue for Microsoft, as per our estimates.… pic.twitter.com/GbxGe4z5Zv
— Rhys Elliott (@superhys) April 29, 2026
To the degree that these estimates are accurate (the data is calculated by Alinea Analytics and not based on official sales figures), what can we glean about Microsoft’s big experiment with ending exclusivity? The first and most obvious takeaway is that Forza Horizon is, without a doubt, Xbox’s biggest, most popular franchise right now. Multiplayer games have also excelled, with cross-play no doubt helping to attract PS5 players to live-service games like Sea of Thieves and Grounded (Grounded 2 remains an Xbox console exclusive).
Diminishing returns and Sony’s cut
On the other hand, Starfield‘s performance looks pretty bad, especially relative to legacy RTS games like Age of Empires 2 and Age of Mythology. Day-and-date releases like Oblivion Remastered, Doom: the Dark Ages, and Ninja Gaiden 4 seem to have sold well relative to what we know of their overall performance across all platforms. Alinea Analytics calculates that Microsoft earned $667 million gross revenue inclusive of Sony’s platform cut, which would amount to about $200 million. Is the multiplatform strategy a success at less than $500 million?
The most interesting game on the list to me is Gears of War: Reloaded. I think some Xbox fans expected it to make a bigger splash on PS5 as one of Microsoft’s OG franchises. But selling 684K copies of a remaster of a 2006 game that arrived in the middle of the summer doesn’t seem that bad. Gears of War: E-Day, a prequel, still doesn’t have a PS5 release date confirmed. If Microsoft wants to keep it exclusive it’s clearly leaving money on the table. But if it wants to bring it to PS5, a windowed waiting period will only hurt the sales potential of an eventual port.
As with all of these estimated data points, it’s hard to know what to make of them in a vacuum. Would sales be stronger if releases were simultaneous? Or is Microsoft in for diminishing returns now that the novelty of Xbox exclusives on PlayStation is wearing thin? At the very least, Alinea Analytics’ estimates present a more complex picture of the potential gains of going multiplatform. It might not be the slam dunk financial case it once seemed like, especially as new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma commits to re-evaluating her predecessor’s strategies.
