Marvel'ın Wolverine'i, Gelen Tepkilere Rağmen Eylül Ayı Satış Listelerinde Zirveye Çıktı

Marvel’s Wolverine was the best-selling game of September in the United States, according to Circana’s projected physical and full-game digital sales, a month after the Insomniac Games release turned into the loudest argument on gaming social media.

Circana analyst Mat Piscatella published the September breakdown on 22 October. The PS5 exclusive took first place on full-game dollar sales and debuted as 2026’s 11th best-selling game overall off a single month on shelves. It also posted the highest launch-month full-game dollar sales of any Sony published title since Helldivers 2 in February 2024.

The list it beat is not a soft one. NBA 2K27, EA Sports FC 27, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, The Blood of Dawnwalker, Wardogs and Onimusha: Way of the Sword all sat below it in September, and the news editor at TheGamer noted the same pattern on PlayStation’s own storefront. Sony’s September download chart put Wolverine first in the US ahead of EA Sports FC 27, NBA 2K27 and Madden NFL 27, and second in the EU behind EA Sports FC 27. Halloween and The Blood of Dawnwalker also made the American download list.

The backlash it sold through was not about the reviews alone. The game spent weeks as a target for arguments about a changed face model and for the scent trail system that critics nicknamed the fart trail, with the director eventually responding publicly to the campaign. The sales chart suggests most buyers never joined that conversation.

None of that was obvious a month ago. Players came out of the opening weekend with mixed reactions: praise for the combat staging, the animation and Logan himself, and complaints about repetitive fights, a linear structure, constant prompts telling you where to go, and a motorcycle set piece that turns out to be a scripted sequence where crashing into a tree costs you nothing. It also landed second on the list of the lowest-rated PlayStation Studios games, behind Concord.

The scores kept sliding after launch. The Metacritic average opened at 78 and was falling down through the first week to 76, where it has stayed, with the user score down from 6.8 to 6.6. OpenCritic followed the same curve, dropping from 81 to 78, and the share of critics recommending the game fell 13 points to 66%.

Insomniac moved on one complaint in particular. Update 1.002.001 added a toggle that switches off story-related scent trails entirely, which were among the biggest complains aimed at the game, after an earlier patch had only dimmed them. Audio cues and Nightmare Roots got visibility controls in the same batch. Those trails worked as a navigation aid for tracking targets, and turning them off removes the hand-holding players kept pointing at.

Liam McIntyre, who voices and plays Logan, said on the Behind The Voice podcast that the reception caught him off guard and that launch day changed the mood, as the Marvel’s Wolverine actor watched his feed fill with photo mode shots instead of review arguments.

“Everyone’s going to have different opinions about it, but I’m just so exceptionally proud.”

— Liam McIntyre

Sony has not published official numbers. Insider Millie A reported the game sold 3 million copies in September, by the 29th, after Alinea Analytics put the first three days at 1.9 million, and claimed the Wolverine DualSense had passed the Hogwarts model to become the best-selling licensed PS5 controller ever made. A 2023 leak set the internal bar at 6 million copies in year one for Sony to keep funding Insomniac’s Marvel slate, which puts the game roughly halfway there with eleven months left.

There is more riding on the number than one game. Insomniac is already reported to be working on Marvel’s Venom and Marvel’s Spider-Man 3, and the Easter eggs scattered through Wolverine point at an X-Men crossover if the money justifies it. On the awards side, the mixed reception has Sony facing the prospect of no Game of the Year nominee for the first time in eleven years, with Housemarque’s Saros the better-rated candidate in the lineup.

A chart win built on a 76 tells me the licence did the heavy lifting, not the design. The complaint list of linear structure and constant prompts reads like a game I would respect for its craft and stop thinking about a week after the credits.

The hardware half of the report belongs to Sony as well. PlayStation 5 dollar sales grew 43% year on year in September and units grew 22%, enough for the platform to lead every other console on both measures and for Sony’s share of hardware spending to hit its highest monthly point since May 2025. Xbox Series spending fell 2% with units down 27%, an all-time September low for the Xbox ecosystem, beating the record set a year earlier. Switch 2 fell 12% in dollars and 14% in units.

The wider picture is flatter. Total US spending across content, hardware and accessories came to $4.8 billion, down 1% year on year, with the year-to-date figure at $41.0 billion and 3% behind 2025. Content fell 2% to $4.2 billion. Hardware was the one segment growing, up 12% to $362 million. Non-mobile subscription spending dropped 5%, the first year-on-year monthly decline in that category since February 2024.

Whether the Wolverine run holds through the holidays is the open question, and I would not bet on it with GTA 6 arriving on 19 November and taking most of the oxygen in the quarter. Official figures should surface in Sony’s next earnings report, which is where the 6 million target stops being a rumour and starts being a scoreboard.

Read also, Playground Games has dated Forza Horizon 6 on PS5 for 26 January 2027, with Premium Edition owners getting in five days early on 21 January alongside the Expansion 1 add-on across all platforms. The racer has already reported around $530 million in revenue and 7.4 million copies sold before reaching PlayStation at all.