For over a decade now, Mortal Kombat releases have consistently been among the best selling in the fighting game genre, and that train seems to keep rolling.
Warner Bros. held their quarterly earnings call today where they spoke on Mortal Kombat 1’s launch sales and reportedly how long the company plans to support it.
According to WB Discovery President David Zaslav, MK1 has sold almost 3 million copies since its release in mid-September.
Those are pretty strong numbers for the first major fighting game to completely skip over the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One completely in favor of focusing on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S (though it did still come out on the Nintendo Switch too).
We don’t have exact numbers to compare to previous entries over the same period of time, but considering Mortal Kombat 11 sold over 2 million in its first few weeks, MK1 is likely on a similar track to its predecessor.
It’ll still have a long way to go to catch the last entry, however, since Mortal Kombat 11 ended up pushing over 15 million copies when all was said and done.
Those numbers aren’t too surprising either, as MK1 was the second-best selling video game in the United States for September too.
That also unsurprisingly puts it ahead of their current largest competitor since Street Fighter 6 has sold around 2.47 million in four or five months though that was to be expected with how previous NetherRealm Studios releases went.
Warner Bros. is also looking to expand their games coverage and push further into practices like free-to-play titles and “games as a service” content structures to try and keep players around.
As part of that, it sounds like WB hopes to support Mortal Kombat 1 for around 3–4 years, which would be a big jump from prior releases.
NRS would typically only release DLC and updates for just 1–2 years since Mortal Kombat 2011 and Injustice: Gods Among Us.
Even Mortal Kombat 11 stopped getting major support after less than two years though that didn’t seem to be the original plan that was likely impacted by COVID.
As for what exactly “support” means in this context remains to be seen, but it sounds like Mortal Kombat 1 is here for the long haul far beyond its first Kombat Pack scheduled to last through July 2024.