Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the second best selling game of 2023 thus far, but falls behind Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in physical sales. What’s more, players are still reporting major performance issues a week after the latest patch was released.
GamesIndustry.biz’s Christopher Dring reported on the UK’s boxed game sales for the week ending April 29th, with the latest Star Wars game being the best seller. This saw it beating out Dead Island 2, FIFA 23, the almost ever-present Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and even Hogwarts Legacy.
Dring also reports the game has managed to become the second biggest game launch of 2023, selling faster than Resident Evil 4 Remake but trailing behind Hogwarts Legacy. Its opening week sales are nonetheless 35% lower than what Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order achieved in 2019. However, in terms of the last 30 years, it’s also the eighth biggest launch for a boxed Star Wars game.
Dring emphasizes that this data is based on boxed sales, with digital sales increasing during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. He also notes the game had a higher retail price than Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
Survivor was usually sold by over £10 ($12.57) more compared to Fallen Order. Dring proposes revenue was therefore only down by 19% from the prior game. Whether this calculation included the changes to the economy and inflation since 2019 is unclear.
Additional facts include 82% of Survivor sales being on PlayStation 5.
Despite the above, digital sales offered the promise of an upset. For example, Dring notes two-thirds of Dead Island 2 sales were digital, and not reflected in the current boxed sale standings. Sure enough, he later added a vital addendum in a Twitter post.
“Although physical sales were down, with the digital data, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor actually beat Star War Jedi: Fallen Order‘s launch sales by over 30%. This is because Survivor‘s digital accounted almost double what Fallen Order managed.” Whether the game continues to surpass its predecessor on some or all fronts will depend on future sales reports.
Nevertheless, the game continues to suffer technical problems. Alongside the previously reported issues with poor frame rate and loading screen hangs, some players claim losing to one particular enemy prevents them recovering their dropped EXP (having been knocked out of bounds on death).
Others are reportedly finding bonus content from preorders and deluxe editions are going missing. Some reportedly return to the game finding the items gone, only for them to reappear (or vanish again) when rebooting the game, while other players have failed to recover their content even on a fresh install.
In spite of user complaints, EA’s Collector’s Edition Sweepstakes are still accepting entries until May 11th.
The EA Star Wars account addressed the latest patch fixes for Survivor, on May 2nd. It improved Ray-Tracing on PC and brought other fixes already on PC to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Neither of the above issues have been discussed at this time of writing.
“We are hard at work on patches that will further improve performance and fix bugs across all platforms. There are more updates to come across all platforms, and we will share that timing when it is available,” publisher EA assured.
Even so, it seems like the update failed to resolve the crashes, and may have caused more. Disgruntled players took to Twitter to air their grievances in the wake of the patch’s release.
“It still didn’t fix the crashes,” @StealerStorm1 mocked, “And it’s crashed for me 30+ times and I bought the deluxe edition fix asap.”
Showing gameplay to back their complaint @Sentinelzelot claimed, “The bird still freeze my game!!” The footage shown, allegedly captured after the recent patch, sees the player approaching an alien bird that will fly in place before freezing the game world.
The bird still freeze my game!! pic.twitter.com/ozqwEk1A6o
— Sentinels❤️😈はあとん＠百鬼組 (@Sentinelzelot) May 1, 2023
“The PC patch caused excessive crashes for me, especially on Jedah,” @ReformedJedi complained. “I had to install NVIDIA Studio Driver and turn off Ray Tracing to get some relief, but the stuttering is still pretty heavy.”
“Well that patch seems to have broken my game,” @ZackMuffinMan bemoaned. The frustrated player then provided further details. “It says I keep running out of VRAM even though I was fine for a couple days (about 3 hours of gameplay) with absolutely no issues so I find that hard to believe. Too late to refund the game now and I can’t play anymore…”
“Can’t even get to the settings to lower the video quality without it crashing but I don’t think that’s the problem because I’m at 70% VRAM usage…” @ZackMuffinMan went on in a follow-up tweet.
“Performance went up but so did the rate of crashes. What an actual joke. By far THE WORST experience I’ve ever had with a game…” laments @LukeHod47860797.
NEXT: ‘Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’ Suffers Performance Issues On Launch Day, Slammed By Gamers