June 4, 2025 by Rhys Elliott

Forza Horizon 5 takes pole position in May’s top 10 PlayStation games by copies sold

PlayStation’s May top 10 by copies sold shares plenty of RPG-heavy similarities with the Steam ranking. But Xbox-published games and sports titles – again – featured more heavily on Sony’s platform.

Let’s have a look.

Forza continues its strong performance from April

Huge Minecraft copies sold in April – due to hype from A Minecraft Movie – saw Forza Horizon 5 debuting at #2 in the April ranking. Yet, Xbox’s flagship racing franchise sold even more copies on PS5 in May, landing it in May’s top spot with 1.3 million copies sold.

This is unsurprising, as Forza launched towards the end of April, and Xbox shrewdly dropped the price to $48 (down from $60) at the end of May. This helped Forza sell another 100K copies in the last two days of the month.

Forza has now surpassed 2.2 million copies sold on PS5, easily exceeding revenues of $100 million.

As we analysed in the first edition of the Alinea Insight newsletter, Forza is Xbox’s best-performing PlayStation port so far and is selling over twice as fast as the others.

Subscribe to our newsletter here, and get these insights delivered straight to your inbox.

Forza’s copies sold on PS5 even overtook one of 2025’s most anticipated PlayStation launches. More on that later.

Around 28% of Forza Horizon 5 players on PS5 have also played Gran Turismo 7 vs. the 54% who played The Crew 2, suggesting Forza is appealing more to those looking for a more arcadey racer – rather than a more true-to-life simulation experience.

We expect these crossover numbers to differ when Xbox inevitably launches the more realistic Forza Motorsport game onto PlayStation – a true clash of the console driving-sim titans.

ps_may_2025_image_1

Elden Ring Nightreign finds its audience on PS5

Echoing our Steam ranking, Elden Ring Nightreign took the #2 spot on PlayStation with 752K copies sold in May. To date, FromSoftware’s standalone PvE Elden Ring spinoff has now sold over 3.5 million copies across all platforms, including almost 900K on PS5.

Nightreign, which took just a few years to make and reused assets from the original title, is a masterclass in efficient game design and reuse. This is a necessity in today’s mature games market, where profitability – and cutting down costs and dev times – is pivotal.

Taking advantage of the astronomical Elden Ring brand (30M copies sold and counting for the original) clearly paid off, as 85% of Elden Ring Nightreign players on PlayStation played the original Elden Ring first. The US and Japan account for over half of Nightreign’s PlayStation players (38% for the US and 13% for Japan)

Want to see this data for yourself? Ask us for a free trial of the Alinea Platform.

More familiar faces in the ranking

The remainder of the top 5 includes plenty of familiar games from last month but with a few notable differences.

EA Sports FC 25 sold another 729K copies on PlayStation in May, bringing its total on the platform to over 18 million. Following underperforming revenues, EA slashed FC 25’s price to $13.99 (down 80% from its RRP of $70, lower than the previously 70% discount a couple of months ago).

EA is trying to acquire users and monetise them via Ultimate Team, which finally just launched a paid battle pass. It still has plenty of users to push over the line, as 61% of FC 24 players on PlayStation have not yet played FC 25. It’s worth noting that FC 24 was included in PS Plus last year, skewing things somewhat.

We predicted last month that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would have a long tail, and we’re happy to report that it did! Expedition 33 sold another 614K copies on PlayStation in May, bringing its PS5 total to over a million sold.

Expedition 33’s word of mouth – thanks to its modern take on classic turn-based RPGs – is continuing in full force. Anime sells, make no mistake. But it turns out that there’s also a market for less-weeby turn-based RPGs, alongside the anime JRPG hits.

Minecraft – a game that just won’t stop selling (350M+ copies sold overall!) – rounded off the top 5. It sold another 491K copies on PlayStation in May, thanks to promotional inertia from A Minecraft Movie.

Minecraft is the second of four Xbox-published games in the top 10, but before we move on to the rest of the list, we want to really hammer home just how well Forza has performed on PlayStation.

Forza Horizon 5 has now outsold Assassin’s Creed Shadows on PS5

Forza Horizon 5 has been selling so well on PS5 that it’s overtaken Assassin’s Creed Shadows by copies sold on its lead platform:

ps_may_2025_image_2

While these are two great games targeting mostly different audiences, the results here stood out to us at Alinea, so we thought we’d share our data. As you can see above:

  • Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which launched on March 20, sold relatively well initially, but copies sold on PS5 have plateaued at around 1.8 million since launch. Shadows was April’s #5 PlayStation game by copies sold, but it is absent from May’s top 10

  • Meanwhile, Forza Horizon 5’s sales have so far shown a longer tail on PlayStation 5, thanks to its cheaper price point ($60 then $48 vs Shadows’ $70) and previously unfulfilled demand for open-world arcadey racers on PlayStation

  • As a result, Forza outsold Assassin’s Creed Shadows on May 15^th^, just under three weeks after Forza launched on PS5

This underlines two things:

  • Xbox’s transition to a third-party publisher is a smart one – returning more on investment than its plateauing subscription strategy.

  • And it’s really time for Ubisoft to discount Assassin’s Creed Shadows below $70.

Want to compare launch-aligned data for any game? You can do that in a few clicks (and a few seconds!) via the Alinea platform. See it for yourself.

With that out of the way, back to the bottom half of PlayStation’s May top 10.

Another classic that won’t stop selling and a new entry to the top 10

While we won’t be getting GTA 6 this year after all, its predecessor is continuing to sell. After more than a decade on the market, GTA 5 still usually sells millions a quarter, so it is no surprise to see it selling another 437K copies on PlayStation in May.

Rockstar’s open-world crime titan sold fewer copies in previous rankings due to its inclusion on PlayStation Plus (Extra and Premium tiers), which it left at the end of April. It’s clearly back with a vengeance, selling 100K copies more in May than in April.

ps_may_2025_image_3

The only other new entrant to May’s top 10 (alongside Nightreign) is Doom: The Dark Ages, selling 270K copies on PS5. While plenty of Doom diehards played and loved the game’s dark fantasy take on Doom (myself included), its lukewarm performance might be due to the high price point and value proposition versus cheaper titles like Expedition 33.

And while Xbox has said the title has reached over three million players, Game Pass accounts for the lion’s share here. As always, leaning on ‘‘players’’ metrics obscures the truth of sales performance.

It seems Doom’s Game Pass inclusion has cannibalised premium sales somewhat. After all, this is the first new Doom game since Xbox bought Bethesda and the first one to launch on Game Pass. Still, the more people who can play Doom, the better.

Doom: The Dark Ages didn’t rank in the Steam top 10 by copies sold; it’s also seeing a lukewarm performance on PC.

In addition to Game Pass PC cannibalisation, Doom is taxing on hardware (raytracing and 8GB RAM minimum), excluding gamers with low- and mid-range PCs. It also doesn’t run on Steam Deck, which is telling.

However, with almost 1.9 million wishlists on Steam, more copies sold are just a price drop away on PC (but also on PlayStation)

Basketball, golf (if you know, you know), and Oblivion round off the top PlayStation top 10

As for the rest of the ranking:

  • NBA 2K25 (#8) sold just shy of 200K copies in May, as its discounted price from April stayed put in May. Don’t expect to see the title on our ranking for June, when NBA is the lead PlayStation Plus monthly game.

  • The Last of Us 2 (#9) sold 195K copies in May, as the title continued to see a spike due to the April release of The Last of Us Complete – as well as cross-pollination from season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us TV show, which ended on a cliffhanger about a third through the second game’s story.

  • Oblivion Remastered (#10) sold 190K copies on PlayStation 5 in May. The remaster, which Xbox for some reason shadow-dropped during Expedition 33’s launch, outsold Expedition 33 on PS5 in April. But the tables turned in May, which we saw coming, and Expedition 33 has now sold more copies on PS5 than fellow Game Pass day-one game Oblivion Remastered.

Oblivion was the fourth and final Xbox-published game on May’s PlayStation top 10, alongside Forza, Minecraft, and Doom. Together, the four Xbox titles accounted for 44% of the copies sold in May’s top 10.

While Xbox’s subscription strategy is starting to show signals of slowing down, its inorganic acquisitions and shift to a third-party publisher are certainly paying off.

Get our content delivered to your inbox by subscribing to the Alinea Insight newsletter.

Want to see our data for yourself in a demo or free trial? We’d love that too!