PlayStation had two very different prestige games carrying its single-player image last year. One sent players across a snowy, blood-soaked revenge story with a sword at the center. The other asked them to follow Hideo Kojima back into a strange, lonely world of cargo, ghosts, beaches, and broken people trying to reconnect.
New analyst estimates put Ghost of Yōtei far ahead of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach on PS5, with Sucker Punch’s sequel reportedly selling almost three times as many copies on Sony’s console.
The latest figures estimate Ghost of Yōtei at around 4.8 million PS5 copies sold, compared with about 1.7 million for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. Sony has not published updated lifetime totals for either game, so these numbers should be treated as estimates rather than official confirmation.
Sony previously said Ghost of Yōtei passed 3.3 million units globally by November 2, just 32 days after release, and described it as a major hit like its predecessor. That early start already put the game in a strong position before later sales estimates pushed the picture even higher.
For Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, the number tells a different story. It is not a collapse, and it does not mean the game failed to find an audience. It does show that Kojima Productions’ sequel is playing in a much narrower lane than Sucker Punch’s open-world samurai adventure.
A new protagonist, a dramatic revenge story, sword fights, horseback travel, snowy landscapes, and the legacy of Ghost of Tsushima all make the pitch easy to understand before anyone sees a review score.
Players know what they are buying, and the game looks like something built for the people who want a big cinematic open-world adventure without needing a long explanation first.
Atsu also gave the sequel a fresh face without making the franchise feel unfamiliar. Sucker Punch changed enough to avoid making a simple repeat, but kept the fantasy clean: explore, hunt, fight, and carve a path through a violent corner of history.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a very different kind of PlayStation exclusive. It is stranger, slower, and more demanding of the player’s patience. Even people who love Kojima’s work usually know they are signing up for something unusual.
That identity is valuable, but it comes with a ceiling. Death Stranding 2 can be beautiful, ambitious, and memorable while still being harder to recommend casually than Ghost of Yōtei. A samurai revenge game is a cleaner pitch than another journey through Kojima’s strange post-apocalyptic delivery network.
One game is built like a mainstream PlayStation tentpole. The other is a prestige sequel for an audience that already knows it wants something odd.
The gap gives PlayStation a simple business lesson, even if the creative lesson is more complicated. Ghost of Yōtei shows that Sony still has a powerful single-player franchise in Sucker Punch’s hands, one that can sell broadly without leaning on a superhero license or live-service structure.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach still matters for a different reason. Games like that keep PlayStation from feeling too predictable. They make the lineup stranger, riskier, and more creator-driven, even if they do not chase the same sales ceiling.
Sony now has to decide how much weight to put behind each kind of success. Ghost of Yōtei looks like a franchise PlayStation can build around for years. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach looks more like the kind of expensive creative swing that keeps the catalog interesting, even when the sales race is already over.
