According to the official PlayStation Twitter account, God of War: Ragnarok sold more copies in its first week than any other first-party PlayStation game. According to Sony, the game sold 5.1 million units in its first week, surpassing The Last of Us Part II, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, and Ragnarok’s predecessor, God of War (2018).
The November 9th release of the AAA action-adventure epic has been a financial and critical success. In addition to selling a lot of copies, it now has a Metacritic score of 94 out of 100 based on 135 critic reviews. That’s the same as the previous game’s score. Our review of Ragnarok for the PlayStation 5 praised the exciting battle with the Leviathan Axe and Blades of Chaos, breathtaking set pieces, and unexpected turns. And our own Nate Ingraham believed the more diverse foes were a significant upgrade over the previous release. His one major problem was with the plot, which he felt to be unnecessarily protracted and, at times, slowed by a lack of editing.
Comparing sales to previous Sony exclusives isn’t necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison. The firm has employed different spans of time for different games, apparently to meet the PR demands of the time. It stated, for example, first-three-day sales for The Last of Us Part II (four million in 2020), Marvel’s Spider-Man (3.3 million in 2018), and God of War (3.3 million in 2018). (3.1 million in 2018). Ragnarok’s first-week sales, on the other hand, almost quadrupled those of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, which sold 2.7 million copies in its first week in 2016.
