What’s Selling: Control Resonant Crosses 1 Million and Debuts at UK No. 2

Welcome to What’s Selling, our weekly look at the sales charts. Every number below comes from an official tracker: GfK for the UK, SELL for France, Famitsu for Japan and Steam‘s own sales and player APIs. We also use our own Player Counts page, which we sample hourly. Weeks differ by region, and so do formats, so each row of the at-a-glance table lists its tracker and week. The SwissCharts week 41 article and the September Circana US report had not been posted by Monday morning, so we skip Switzerland and the US this week. When they land, the next edition picks them up.

The short story: EA Sports FC 27 won’t give up the top spot in Europe. Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] is the new No. 1 in Japan. And Control Resonant walked into the UK boxed chart at No. 2 in its first physical-chart week, the same week Remedy said the game has cleared 1 million copies sold.

This week at a glance

UK: six new games in the top 40

FC 27 stayed No. 1 on the UK physical chart for the week ending October 17, according to GfK. Six new games debuted in the top 40, led by Control Resonant at No. 2, Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse at No. 3, Toy Story: Retro Roundup! + Toy Story 3 Complete Edition at No. 4 and Valor Mortis at No. 9. Tales of Eternia: Remastered entered at No. 15 and Bluey’s Happy Snaps at No. 34.

The Control Resonant debut is the more interesting entry on the chart. The game launched digitally on September 24 and never had a chance to chart physically in its first three weeks; this was its first boxed-chart week and it landed just one slot behind FC 27. Remedy said on October 15 that the game has now sold 1 million copies worldwide, the fastest a Remedy game has hit that mark (the studio’s previous record-holder was Alan Wake 2 at roughly two months in 2023, per Eurogamer).

Castlevania’s No. 3 debut is the strongest first week for a new non-FC IP in the UK top 40 since Gears of War: E-Day’s No. 3 last week. Star Wars: Galactic Racer, last week’s No. 2, fell three spots to No. 5. The week’s quietest eye-opener was Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, which jumped three spots from No. 10 to No. 7. The reminder: Nintendo’s Switch evergreen catalog still pulls in a boxed audience six months after launch. The Witcher III: Wild Hunt GOTY Edition rounded out the top 10, presumably on a Switch eShop promotion.

France: Gears and Kingdom Hearts arrive

In France, FC 27 stayed No. 1 for week 41, according to SELL. The week’s big debuts swept the rest of the top five: Star Wars: Galactic Racer at No. 2, Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] at No. 3, Gears of War: E-Day at No. 4 and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival at No. 5.

Per-console breakdowns (per SELL): Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] led Switch retail, EA Sports FC 27 led PS5, and Gears of War: E-Day led Xbox Series X|S. The platform story is the same one the Famitsu chart tells: Square Enix and Capcom are leaning into Switch 2 as their primary Western retail platform, and the format is selling in France the same way it’s selling in Japan.

Japan: Kingdom Hearts leads, Switch 2 dominates hardware

Famitsu’s chart for the week ending October 11 had a clear winner: Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] debuted at No. 1 on Switch 2 with 23,411 copies, plus another 6,261 on PS5, a 79% Switch 2 / 21% PS5 split and 29,672 first-week Japanese copies. Switch 2 led every other entry’s first-week split on the chart, the same JRPG-leaning platform story the French chart told.

The most interesting hold of the week was Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve (PS5-only at retail), which sat at No. 3 with 13,801 copies in its third week on sale, taking its Japan physical total to 76,814. We already covered Ace Combat 8’s worldwide 1-million milestone (Bandai Namco says it is the fastest in series history); the Japan physical run at three weeks is the cleanest read on whether the steady sales strength holds outside the launch spike.

Other Famitsu notes:

• Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen (Capcom) debuted at No. 4 Switch 2 and No. 8 PS5, with the same Switch 2-first split as Kingdom Hearts.
• Splatoon Raiders held No. 9 with 5,043 weekly / 681,648 lifetime copies.
• Tomodachi Collection (original Switch) held No. 10 with 4,663 weekly / 1,628,085 lifetime copies, the longest-running series on the chart.
• Famitsu hardware: Switch 2 22,420 weekly / 6,408,973 lifetime, well clear of the PS5 Digital Edition at 11,611 weekly / 1,471,133 lifetime.

Full Famitsu software top 30 is at the Famitsu ranking page.

What’s selling on Steam

Valve’s Steam Weekly Top Sellers chart (by revenue, week ending October 13) had Star Wars: Galactic Racer at No. 1, with EA Sports FC 27, Steam Deck, and Gears of War: E-Day rounding out the top four. Risk of Rain 2 (No. 5), Arc Raiders (No. 6), Risk of Rain 2: Hallowed Concepts (No. 7, new), Dead by Daylight (No. 8), Dragon’s Dogma 2 (No. 9) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival (No. 10, new) filled out the rest of the top 10. Including free games moved Dota 2, AION 2 and Counter-Strike 2 into the top three.

It’s a quieter PC revenue week than console boxed copies. The six UK top-40 new entries don’t all show up on Valve’s revenue chart, since several are digital-only on console or sold best on PlayStation.

Who’s playing on Steam right now

Retail and revenue charts only count boxed or paid transactions. Steam’s player counts show who’s actually playing. Here are the week’s big new releases, from Pixel Herald’s hourly Steam sampling (24-hour peak, checked Monday afternoon US Central):

For comparison, Gears of War: E-Day peaked at 31,517 players at launch. Live numbers for the biggest games are on our Player Counts page. The full Top 10 on Steam, with week-over-week moves, is in this week’s Pixel Herald Steam Charts post.

The week’s chart has more to say than “FC 27 stays No. 1.” Three takeaways worth a paragraph:

1. Control Resonant’s UK boxed debut is a real signal. A 1M-in-three-weeks digital run is a strong opening by any measure, and the fact that it then walked into the UK physical chart at No. 2, beating out a strong slate of physical launches from Castlevania, Toy Story, and Valor Mortis, points to a wider audience re-buying on PS5 for the physical release rather than just first-week digital appetite.
2. Square Enix and Capcom are routing their JRPGs through Switch 2 in both markets. Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] is 79% Switch 2 / 21% PS5 in Japan and led the French Switch retail chart this week. Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is similar. The Switch 2 audience in Japan is real (6.4M installed, more than 18× the PS5 Digital Edition’s weekly hardware in the same country), and Western JRPG publishers are treating it as the primary platform, not a port.
3. The Game Pass-vs-box experiment continues to cut both ways. Gears of War: E-Day is in the UK top 10 four weeks after launch and in the Steam Weekly Top Sellers top 4. Being on Game Pass from day one hasn’t stopped it from selling copies. Modern Warfare 4’s Campaign Early Access on October 16 already pushed the Call of Duty Steam hub to an 88,374 peak (per Pixel Herald’s tracking), and the full launch on October 23 should be the next big shake of the top 10.

Next week: the UK’s chart will probably see Modern Warfare 4‘s full launch on October 23 stir the top five, Famitsu publishes its next chart for the week ending October 18, and we’ll see whether Star Wars: Galactic Racer’s Steam revenue lead holds for a second week or whether EA Sports FC 27 climbs back into the top spot. We’ll also get a fresh Circana US report when September numbers land mid-month.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report