July 9, 2025 by Rhys Elliott
FC 25, Death Stranding 2, and Rematch top June's PlayStation ranking, while Stellar Blade's PC launch led to sales on PS5
PlayStation’s June 2025 ranking by copies sold brings familiar faces, new contenders, and another strong showing for Xbox-published titles.
Sports, action games, and new hits all found their target audiences – and new ones.
Let’s break it down.
EA FC 25’s price drop helped it top June’s copies sold ranking
EA Sports FC 25 reclaimed the top spot in June. It sold 905K copies on PlayStation alone after slashing prices to $13.99 (and equivalents across several key regions).
June marks FC’s highest monthly sales since March, thanks to a combination of aggressive pricing, Ultimate Team monetisation incentives (the season 8 premium battle pass), and a spike in returning franchise players in the lead up to the Euro 25-26 qualifiers.
EA’s strategic summer push – and typical end-of-H1 fire sale – has paid off. Total FC 25 sales on PlayStation now exceed 19.2 million. But there are still players yet to convert.
Over 59% of EA FC 24 players on PlayStation still haven’t upgraded to 25. Yet, many of these FC 24 players came in via PlayStation Plus, so this is not wholly surprising.
We reckon that EA will continue leaning into discounts, promotional bundles, and perhaps another PlayStation Plus activation ahead of the FC 26 launch – as it typically does.
Kojima’s Death Stranding 2 debuts at #2
Death Stranding 2 launched at #2, with 687 K copies sold by the end of June (in just one week). The title, which builds on everything set out by Kojima and his team in the original game, now sits at around 850 K copies sold. It also generated the most premium game revenues on PlayStation in June.
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Death Stranding 2 has been a huge hit among critics, but this eccentric game’s sales have come in below other PlayStation Studios titles. Still, it’s one of those franchises that has a long tail – it will continue to sell well over time.
And many of those who have started playing are bingeing and loving it (myself included!). Almost a third of Death Stranding 2 players have already played for more than 20 hours (with 4% playing for over 50 hours!).
While some pundits have suggested Death Stranding 2 will be an ‘‘Alan Wake 2 situation’’ in terms of slower sales from an auteur-led game, our data shows that Death Stranding 2 is selling over three times as fast as Alan Wake 2 on PS5. DS2 is also stabilizing far slower so far.
Death Stranding 2 also has a sizeable Chinese audience, with China being its #2 market on PlayStation after the US. This suggests that the inevitable PC port, which we predict will arrive in Q3 2026, will extend this premium game’s product lifecycle significantly, in a similar vein to Stellar Blade’s PC port. More on that one later.
A new IP and a return to a spinoff of a juggernaut IP
Easy-to-learn, hard-to-master arcade soccer title Rematch took the #3 spot with 569 K copies sold on PlayStation in June. Rematch has now sold 680 K overall on PlayStation, adding to the 1.4 million sold on Steam.
As we outlined in last week’s Alinea Insight newsletter, Rematch puts football at the forefront – unlike other games that have tried to emulate Rocket League’s success, to no avail.
Sloclap’s Rematch appeals to sports and competitive action fans alike. Our PlayStation crossover data shows that 88% of Rematch players on PlayStation have also played Rocket League on the platform, 61% have played FC 25, and 23% have played Sifu, Sloclap’s 2022 beat ’em up.
With FC 25 and Rematch, soccer games accounted for 1.6 million copies sold in June’s PlayStation top 10, accounting for 30% of the copies sold in the ranking.
Following close behind was Elden Ring: Nightreign, which dropped to #4 this month with 558K copies sold (down from May’s 752 K). FromSoftware’s strategy of building modular PvE content around its Elden Ring universe continues to resonate.
Forza Horizon 5 continues to sell copies on PS5
Microsoft’s Forza Horizon 5 came in at #5 with 555 K copies sold (that’s A LOT of fives), bringing its PlayStation total to just under 2.9 million. Much of the extra copies sold were driven by a timely discount to $48 that ran until June 11.
It’s the first Xbox-published port to hit that milestone on Sony hardware, and it’s done so in under three months.
Forza’s now almost surpassed PS5 sales of Astro Bot, PlayStation’s premier premium first-party launch, which picked up game of the year at The Game Awards last year.
We expect to see Forza continuing to sell well on PlayStation – especially if it has another price drop.
Either way, Forza has set the tone for Xbox’s continued strategy as a third-party publisher ahead of the Gears of War Reloaded simultaneous launch on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC next month.
Keep your eyes peeled in the future for data and analysis on that. Or subscribe to the Alinea Insight newsletter to get the insights directly to your inbox.
Familiar names return
Further down the ranking, we see titles with more stamina than Sam from Death Stranding:
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GTA V (#6) saw 431 K copies sold in June, which is largely in line with the open-world titan’s sales in May. To date, GTA V has sold a whopping 215 million copies across all platforms, making it one of the best-selling games of all time. GTA V is one of those games that never stops selling millions a quarter.
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Minecraft (#7), still riding high from the inertia of the $955-million-grossing A Minecraft Movie, crafted another 416 K copies sold on PlayStation in June. Another factor in its continued success was the new Chase the Skies update and the game’s most substantial official visual upgrade to date (and associated marketing).
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Stellar Blade re-entered at #8, with 241 K copies sold. Cross-pollination from the runaway success of the PC port is a major driver here. More on that in the next section.
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Expedition 33 (#9) Gommaged another 240 K copies in June, bringing its total sold on PlayStation to 1.3 million, on top of its 2.2 million on Steam. Expedition 33 is selling faster than JRPGs from iconic studios, even selling twice as many PlayStation copies as Atlus’ Metaphor: ReFantazio. Wild times.
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The Last of Us: Part II (#10) rounds off the list with 150 K copies sold, boosted by the discount from $50 to $40 for The Last of Us Part II Remastered (part of the Days of Play promotion).
Stellar Blade’s PC launch trickled into more sales on PS5
We’ve been poring over the data, and there’s usually a small sales bump on PS5 when Sony ports a first-party game to Steam. But Stellar Blade has just provided one of the clearest cases of a cross-platform launch driving sales back to the original console version.
Stellar Blade had already seen a few price cuts across Q4 2024, Q1 2025, and Q2 2025. But the impact of these discounts was modest, mostly resulting in short-term bumps of 30-50K new units sold.
But in the weeks leading to Stellar Blade’s PC launch, sales for the original 2024 PS5 version had mostly stabilized.
Then came June 11.
As you can see on the right side of the chart above, Stellar Blade’s PC launch on June 11 even gave the PS5 version the sales bump it needed to push past the coveted 2-million-sold mark.
Immediately following the PC launch, PS5 copies sold jumped from 1.83 M to almost 2.1 M in under four weeks. This jump of over 220 K units sold happened when Stellar Blade’s PS5 price held firm at $69.99.
That’s more than four times the growth rate seen during prior discounted periods and represents extra PS5 revenues of over $10 million.
Content like mod showcases, visual comparisons, and streamers testing the PC version led many PS5 owners back to the original version – and at full price to boot.
The experiments of shorter PS5-to-Steam release dates seem to be paying off for PlayStation, both off-platform and on-.
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