Rise of the Ronin has become Koei Tecmo’s fastest-selling game, director says

PS5-exclusive is accelerating past Nioh and Nioh 2

Koei Tecmo / Sony

PS5-exclusive Rise of the Ronin may not be talked about much as far as games released this year go and caused some concerns for Koei Tecmo earlier this year with its slow launch, but it looks like the game has recovered exceedingly well: Team Ninja’s Fumihiko Yasuda stated in an interview with Japanese outlet DenFaminicoGamer that Rise of the Ronin is the best-selling Koei Tecmo game at this point, which is a little ambiguous. 

However, given that this answer fell in the context of the company’s latest financial report, which stated that Rise of the Ronin had begun to out-pace the sales of both Nioh and Nioh 2, he likely meant that the open-world RPG is the best-selling game in Koei Tecmo’s history at this point after its launch when compared to its other products in the same time period. Since the Nioh series has sold well past seven million copies in total, Rise of the Ronin sailing past it already would make little sense.

Yasuda elaborated this point during the interview, reporting that Rise of the Ronin was enjoying a long tail with steady sales, particularly in Japan, so it seems like the trend observed in the report has been confirmed in the months since its publication.

Japan was also the only market in which the game really made a splash in the charts, whereas it was completely overshadowed by Dragon’s Dogma 2 in the rest of the world. Rise of the Ronin’s release in South Korea was canceled after Yasuda’s remarks about certain historical figures and philosophies touched upon in the game sparked public outrage in the country.

Nioh, which was launched on PS4 in 2017, managed to surpass one million sales in its first two weeks on the market and then passed the three million sales milestone three years after launch. Nioh 2 was released on PS4 in March 2020 – after which the studio began working on Rise of the Ronin in earnest, according to Yasuda – and had sold two million copies by April 2021.

While we don’t have exact sales figures for the Rise of the Ronin, Yasuda’s confirmation of what the company observed is a good indicator of the game selling well above a million units by now and being on track to sell two million copies by the time its first anniversary comes around.