Still beating out the competition though by a much smaller margin than before
Mortal Kombat 1 finds itself in an interesting position entering the game’s second year of content between the fan reception and the rough spot Warner Bros. Discovery is currently in, but it’s still pushing new copies into the hands of players.
In just around 11 months since the fighting game first released, Mortal Kombat 1 has apparently hit a new sales milestone.
WB Games and NetherRealm Studios revealed MK1 has reached over 4 million copies sold worldwide in a press release alongside the drop of Cyrax’s gameplay trailer for the Khaos Reigns expansion.
Previously, the Warner CEO David Zaslav stated the fighting game was close to 3 million in a little over a month on shelves and crossed that point sometime before January 2024.
This certainly does appear to make Mortal Kombat 1 the fastest-selling fighting game of the new generation, but it doesn’t quite appear to be living up to its predecessor.
Capcom recently revealed that Street Fighter 6 reached 3.77 million units by the end of June marking its first year on the market while Tekken 8 was said to hit 2 million in a month.
So NetherRealm continues the trend of outselling its direct competition overall, however, the numbers are a lot closer than they were during the last console generation.
Mortal Kombat 11 appeared to set a new sales record for the franchise after reaching 12 million copies sold in 2021 and then 15 million in 2022 having launched in 2019.
While we don’t have the full picture in terms of sales data for MK11, those figures do likely put the last entry in the series as pushing at least 6 million in its first year if not more.
Mortal Kombat 11 also topped U.S. sales charts for multiple months in a row and finished the year as the fifth-best selling game in the country for 2019 while MK1 came in at eighth place for 2023.
So things are still looking pretty good for MK1 overall, but its sales appear to have significantly slowed after its first quarter since they only went up an extra million over the past eight months or so — though it’s not stated when exactly the game reached 4 million.
The Khaos Reigns expansion for MK1 should likely help boost sales pretty significantly starting next month at least with the new Story Mode plus DLC fighters Cyrax, Sektor, Noob Saibot, Scream’s Ghostface, The Terminator’s T-1000 and Conan the Barbarian, who may or may not be voiced by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Although many players seem to enjoy the core gameplay system in place for MK1, the game has faced criticism for its handling of the Kameo fighters, cosmetic DLC practices, glitches, grindy Invasions and some more issues that have hurt its retention compared to its predecessor.
This also comes at a time where Warner Bros. Discovery is really hurting for money and is reportedly looking into selling off some or potentially all of its gaming division and licensing out its IP to external developers.
NetherRealm Studios has already been hit by layoffs that included the entirety of their mobile games division and shuttering of Mortal Kombat Onslaught after just a year.
Mortal Kombat itself though won’t be going away any time soon considering Zaslav stated the fighting franchise is one of WBD’s billion-dollar IP alongside DC and Harry Potter.
Series Co-creator Ed Boon also recently said they plan to support the current game for “years,” and this is only year two.
It is interesting to see, however, that while Street Fighter 6 more than doubled the first year of Street Fighter 5, MK1 hasn’t quite lived up to what came before.
4 million games is still nothing to shake a stick at too.
Khaos Reigns is currently scheduled to release with the new story and playable Cyrax, Sektor and Noob on September 24.
Mentioned by appomo.