The 5 games that ruled July: Palworld at 30 million copies sold and the fifth is not out yet

Palworld 1.0: 30.5 million copies and nearly a million concurrent players

July leaves an awkward snapshot of the industry: the game that ruled the month is two and a half years old, the one that made the most money arrived with 380 layoffs underneath it, and the fifth on this list is not on sale yet. In order, then.

The top spot is not up for debate. Palworld left early access on 10 July, two and a half years after coming out of nowhere, and version 1.0 pushed it back to a peak of 962,000 concurrent players on Steam, its best since January 2024. Alinea Analytics estimates reported by Infobae put it at 30.5 million copies and around $700 million in direct sales, 27.1 million of those copies on Steam alone. Counting Game Pass, roughly 40 million people have set foot in the game.

But my favourite detail is the smallest one: Pocketpair cut the price by 30% on the very day the finished version went live. Discounting your own launch sounds like heresy and it brought in a million and a half new buyers in a week. Smartest move of the month. And even so, those 962,000 players are less than half the peak it hit in January 2024: Palworld's ceiling used to be much higher.

Black Flag Resynced: Ubisoft's best launch in years, with 380 layoffs behind it

Second place leaves the worst aftertaste. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced arrived on 9 July at $59.99, ten dollars below a standard release, and sold 3.5 million copies in fourteen days. Yves Guillemot boasts of "the best rating by players and critics since the original Black Flag", and the company admits its entire first-year sales target was met in a fortnight.

But in that same quarter Ubisoft reported net revenue of €256 million, down 9%, and cut around 380 jobs across Barcelona, Halifax and Stockholm. Staff in Barcelona were protesting outside while the company put the finishing touches to its record-breaking press release. A game saving the quarter and the redundancy letters landing on the same week says plenty about who collects the upside at a big publisher.

Splatoon Raiders: Nintendo pulls Splatoon out of multiplayer and it works

Something odd happened at Nintendo on 23 July: Splatoon stopped being a competitive game. Splatoon Raiders, the series' first spin-off and a Switch 2 exclusive, casts you as a mechanic tagging along with Deep Cut across the Spirhalite Islands, hunting treasure and splattering Salmonids. A campaign, a story, four-player co-op and not one minute of compulsory Turf War.

It paid off: the game sits at number one on the Switch 2 eShop in the 26 July charts. No surprise here. The series has spent a decade selling a mode that drags you online whenever Nintendo says so; offering the exact opposite, something you can play on the sofa and pause when the doorbell rings, was a debt owed to half the community.

Final Fantasy X on Switch 2: a 2001 game outselling half of this year's releases

Now the uncomfortable part of that same chart. Sixth place on the eShop belongs to Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster, a PS2 game remastered in 2013 and resold for the umpteenth time, which also tops the download-only category. Second place is Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in its Switch 2 edition, a game from 2017.

Square Enix and Nintendo have worked out that their back catalogue goes toe to toe with 2026 releases, and that leaves me somewhere between admiration and boredom. Admiration because the trick works without risking a euro on new production. Boredom because a console launched a year ago whose sales chart is stuffed with re-releases does not quite feel like a new console. It is the same move Xbox has been making with its classics on PC, except Nintendo charges full new-release money for it.

The fifth one is not out yet: Halo lands on PlayStation on Tuesday

Halo: Campaign Evolved, the Unreal Engine 5 rebuild of 2001's Combat Evolved, arrives on Tuesday 28 July on Xbox, PC and — for the first time in the brand's 25 years — PlayStation 5. The Standard Edition costs €59.99 and the game joins Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass that same day, though not Essential or Premium: we broke down the editions, unlock times and PC requirements here. It already shows up on Steam's weekly best-seller list for 20 to 26 July on pre-orders alone, before it exists. That is why it is on this list.

What interests me is not the remake, which brings new missions and looks great. It is the gesture: Microsoft sending its mascot to a rival console in the same month Nintendo resells Xenoblade and Ubisoft celebrates a record while cutting jobs in Barcelona. July was exactly that. On Tuesday we find out how many people buy Halo on a PlayStation, and that number will explain the rest of the year better than any showcase. See you at the end of August with August's five.