Marvel’s Wolverine has had a rather strange launch. The internet has spent the past few days tearing into Insomniac’s latest PS5 adventure, but apparently, plenty of players decided to ignore the noise and buy it anyway. According to estimates from Alinea Analytics, Marvel’s Wolverine sold around 1.9 million copies in its first three days, generating approximately $130 million in revenue.
The internet said “meh”; wallets said “snikt”
The numbers are particularly interesting because they arrive against a backdrop of fairly mixed critical reception and plenty of online criticism. Wolverine has been mocked across gaming social media for various design, UI, and animation choices. At the same time, its Metacritic score has landed well below the heights usually associated with Insomniac’s PlayStation output.
Yet the early sales suggest that the online conversation hasn’t stopped people from picking up the game. Alinea estimates that 1 million of the 1.9 million copies were digital pre-orders, meaning a sizeable chunk of buyers had already committed to Wolverine before reviews and post-launch discourse entered the picture. Physical copies accounted for 22.9% of revenue, according to the same analysis.
Wolverine has already outrun some big PS5 names
The early performance also puts Marvel’s Wolverine ahead of several other PlayStation releases from 2026. Alinea Analytics estimates that it has already passed Death Stranding 2‘s lifetime PS5 performance, which it puts at around 1.8 million copies and $129 million in revenue. It is also currently the best-performing new PlayStation Studios game on PS5 this year based on the firm’s estimates.
That said, there is an important asterisk here: Sony and Insomniac have not officially confirmed Wolverine’s sales figures. These are Alinea Analytics estimates, and their figures do not account for unsold retail inventory. Nonetheless, while social media may be sharpening its claws, Wolverine’s real test now is whether those strong opening sales can keep roaring once the launch hype fades.
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