Far Cry New Dawn: 86% drop in Far Cry's retail sales 5

The first sales reports suggest that Far Cry New Dawn is going through a difficult period in the retail business. Sales declined significantly from Far Cry 5, its direct predecessor, and Far Cry Primal, the previous spin-off company. These first figures only take into account physical sales, but with direct comparisons to previous titles that appear so weak, it would seem that Ubisoft is plagued by Far Cry's fatigue.

New Dawn's first week sales are down 86.5 percent from last year's Far Cry 5, GamesIndustry.biz reports. You would not expect New Dawn to be as successful as a full, numbered set in the series, but he also sold just over a quarter of what Primal did in the same amount of time. These are retail sales in the UK, where New Dawn sold 60% on PlayStation 4, 39% on Xbox One and about 1% on PC – as expected without digital units.

Although the increase in digital adoption certainly means that physical sales are less important than before, its adoption has not increased enough in recent years to explain the fall of Far Cry New Dawn compared to its predecessors . One of the possibilities is the release date – New Dawn was launched on a Friday instead of Tuesday of previous games. There is therefore less time for these sales to accumulate.

Despite all this, New Dawn has always dominated the charts this week, just ahead of Metro Exodus. Even though Exodus is behind its disappointing debut in New Dawn, it's still up 50% from Last Light in 2013 – although it's physical retail sales, you can probably attribute that to a more advanced console version.

In our article on Far Cry New Dawn, Julian finds that the new complications of the game create a busy workload. The other reviews – as collated in our score summary – have broadly aggregated to our score of 7/10, although there is a significant number of outliers both higher and lower than this one.

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It's a solid game according to most accounts, although not particularly impressive. Since Ubisoft relies on the same formula since Far Cry 3 in 2013, it seems that we are at the point of having diminishing returns.

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