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Death Stranding just made every “walking simulator” joke look foolish at the UK cash register.
Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding launched worldwide on November 8, 2019, and within days the PS4 exclusive had done something the pre-release chatter never predicted: it sold. According to UK boxed sales data tracked by GamesIndustry.biz for the week ending November 9, 2019, Kojima Productions’ first game since splitting from Konami debuted at No. 2 on the physical retail chart, trailing only Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. That made it the second-biggest new IP launch and second-biggest PS4 exclusive launch of the entire year.
- Death Stranding entered the UK chart at No. 2 for the week ending November 9, 2019, behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which held the top spot for a third consecutive week.
- It ranks as the second-biggest new PS4 exclusive launch of 2019, trailing only Bend Studio’s Days Gone, which outsold its debut week by roughly 36%.
- Its launch numbers surpassed those of other 2019 PS4 exclusives, including MediEvil and Concrete Genie.
The Chart Numbers
Modern Warfare’s grip on No. 1 wasn’t news — the game had already been sitting there for three straight weeks by the time Death Stranding shipped. What mattered was who showed up at No. 2. A brand-new, unproven IP from a studio that had never released a game before jumped straight past every other PS4 exclusive to launch in 2019 with the sole exception of Days Gone, which had a five-month head start back in April.
Days Gone’s Shadow, MediEvil and Concrete Genie Left Behind
Bend Studio’s post-apocalyptic action game still holds the crown for the year, moving roughly 36% more physical copies in its debut week than Death Stranding managed. But finishing ahead of MediEvil’s PS1-remake nostalgia play and Sony Bend’s smaller-scale Concrete Genie says plenty about where Kojima’s game landed with buyers who’d spent months hearing it might be a dud. Anyone tracking Sony’s exclusive lineup this generation, including where Ghost of Tsushima fits into that pecking order once it arrives, now has a real data point to measure future launches against.
From “Boring Walking Simulator” to Addicting
The irony is hard to miss. Skeptical critics and social media detractors spent the run-up to launch dismissing Death Stranding as a tedious walking simulator, a label that stuck hard after early reviews came in polarized. Once players actually got Sam Bridges out into the field, the tone flipped almost overnight — the traversal loop and the asynchronous Social Strand multiplayer, where strangers’ ladders, ropes, and structures appear in your own game, became the exact thing people couldn’t stop talking about.
Everyone called it a walking simulator. Now they can’t stop walking through it.
Kojima’s Bet on an Unconventional Design
None of this happened by accident. Kojima built an entire game around cooperation between players who never see each other in real time, betting that the mechanic would carry more weight than combat or spectacle. The commercial result — a second-place finish behind Modern Warfare’s dominant third week — backs up the argument that the design worked exactly as intended, even if it took actual hands-on time with the game to convince the doubters.
Modern Warfare isn’t ceding that top spot anytime soon, not after three straight weeks on it, but Death Stranding didn’t need the crown to make its point. Sam Bridges is still out there delivering packages, players are still stacking ladders and zip lines for strangers they’ll never meet, and the “boring walking simulator” crowd is nowhere to be found on the actual UK sales chart.
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