Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II was released on May 21 following years of teasers and trailers. It was first announced in 2018 and was penned as being one of the most visually advanced games ever made – and to give the game credit, it hits that target just fine. However, it’s a testament to the fact that visuals aren’t everything, as recent sales data has revealed that the game performed terribly during May 2024.
Sacrificing Senua
Hellblade II is a fairly short game that offers an immersive, impactful story mixed up with groundbreaking visuals, and it performed fairly well in reviews when it was released. Presently, it sits on Metacritic with a score of 80, which isn’t awful.
However, US sales data published by Circana has revealed how poorly Hellblade II performed when it was released, with the game coming in 37th place overall in the charts for full-game dollar sales. On Xbox, it ended up in 21st place. In terms of player count, it fell behind the likes of Fallout 76, and on Steam, it peaked at just 3,892 players.
In the European sales charts, it was revealed that Hellblade II failed to break into the top 100 games in May. On streaming platforms, Hellblade II crashed pretty quickly. It reached a peak of 110,193 viewers on Twitch on launch day, but by the second day on the market, that number had dwindled by 90%, and by the following week, a peak of just 900 users was recorded.
It’s hardly a flash in the pan, but it’s a short-lived, short-form game that only offers a few hours of entertainment, and once you’re done, you’re done.
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Ninja Theory next to close they took like ten years to make this trash. Tango should have never been closed.
This game took way too long and was never going to fill what Xbox needed. Weirdly enough HiFi did something positive unlike this and they shut that studio down despite having the only good game according to them it sold well. But the studio that makes garbage stays open.
Ninja Theory doesn’t “make garbage” just because one game didn’t do well. Gonna say the same thing about Arkane Austin? We’re talking about people here. Nobody deserves to be fired for a 7/10 sequel, just because a better studio was closed. That’s some fucking moon logic.
They do make trash they make boring movie games and that bleeding edge game no one remembers also the founder left the studio another sign of the studio being trash.
They took ten years because MS forced them to make it a technical showcase, only revealing any progress on it via tech demos is proof enough of that. I don’t blame Ninja Theory, I blame the executives who said “make the sequel to this short emotional indie game a AAA powerhouse”. They were set up to fail.
Y’all just mad at Team Xbox doing well. ONE game doing mediocre isn’t going to break the camel’s back.
Xbox just had their best E3 (and to be QUITE frank, it was the best overall E3 in several years), and everyone is STILL crying doom & gloom.
I feel like so many International gamers are just happy to see Xbox fail, only because it is an American-proud company… SMH