PS5 Owners Don’t Play Sony’s First-Party Games

It’s hard to believe, but a year ago to the date, Sony officially released the PlayStation 5 (well, in the States; globally it came out on November 19). Despite serious supply issues, an estimated 13 million players have been able to get their hands on one. And they’ve used these coveted next-gen consoles to play—cue drum roll—a whole lot of Fortnite.

Over on the PlayStation Blog this morning, Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Jim Ryan ran down the top 10 most-played PS5 games from the console’s first year. Fortnite, a free-to-play game and one of the buzziest digital social spaces on the planet, took the top spot. But there are some other surprises. Here’s the full list:

• Fortnite
• Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
• FIFA 21
• NBA 2K21
• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
• Destiny 2
• MLB The Show 21
• Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
• Demon’s Souls
• NBA 2K22

Some caveats: The ranking is based on cumulative hours played across the playerbase, not on total number of players. (According to Ryan, PS5 players clocked a cumulative 4.6 billion hours.) Data is also tallied from November 12, 2020, through September 30, 2021, precluding some big late-September or early-October releases from making the cut. Of course, games like Kena: Bridge of Spirits or Deathloop likely wouldn’t rank; both are largely single-player, and not designed to command hundreds of hours of attention from now ‘til the end of days. But it’s not hard to picture cooperative zombie shooter Back 4 Blood—the second best-selling game of October, per NPD Data—on here.

I’ll confess to some surprise at the absence of PS5 exclusives here. Of the top ten, just three first-party games (Demon’s Souls, MLB the Show 21, and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales) cracked the ranks. Two were available at launch. And of the full list, only Demon’s Souls is available exclusively on PS5. In the past year, Sony’s released two stellar PS5 exclusives: Returnal and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Yes, both are one-offs, but I personally did not expect so many people to clamor for a PS5 only to use it to play games they can play anywhere else.

You know what’s not a surprise, though? The inclusion of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, an open-world game that never freakin’ ends. Fun fact: My current save file is responsible for, oh, 4.5 billion of those 4.6 billion total hours.

Correction, 11:00 a.m. ET: An earlier version of this article neglected to mention that MLB The Show 21 is a Sony first-party game. Kotaku regrets the error.