It is obvious that the pretty likely the best seller SP game in Steam history -Cyberpunk- will have better CCUs than games who only sold a few thousand copies. But that doesn't mean CCUs are a good source to estimate sales.
Because as an example, Wukong has a 2.5M CCU peak while Cyberpunk has a 1M peak and that doesn't mean Wukong has sold 2.5x times the Steam units Cyberpunk sold. In the same way that
Helldivers 2 has a 459K peak and Destiny 2 317K and Helldivers 2 hasn't sold more than Destiny 2.
Thats because despite having lower peak, Cyberpunk and Destiny 2 have been sellind during several years while the other two games compared to them are pretty new. And in the case of Wukong, an insane percentage of its sales are from a single country, China, which bumps the CCUs.
For obvious reasons dozens if not hundreds of gamedev studios, gamedev/publisher associations and market analysis firms have been researching different sales estimates mehods having the real sales data of hundreds of games to compare.
The consensus is that CCUs, a metric to know the active userbase of a game in a specific point helps for that and to know if the active userbase of a game grows or decreases at certain points, but isn't useful for sales estimates due to many reasons:
- Games -particularly healthy ones- sell over time, normally over years, and the CCU peak only reflects typically the launch weekend peak.
- Depending on the game, its sales are more or less focused on the launch days but generally the first weekend sales aren't even the majority of the sales.
- The launch peak is also affected by other things like maybe a game maybe not selling so great -or sold but still aren't played- on launch weekend because there were important recent releases the same or in previous weeks and players are playing them instead.
- Discounts or price cuts strategy heavily affects sales far from release and they aren't reflected in the launch CCU peak.
- Many people buys a game and leaves it in the backlog to play it later and in many cases never plays it, so isn't tracked in CCUs until they play it. Which in many cases isn't never.
- If two games have the same sales but one has players mostly on a timezone (let's say those who sell mostly only in NA, or mostly only in EU, or Japan only, or China only and the other with sales spreads more evenly across all timezones, the game with sales focused on a timezone will show a higher CCU because their players will play at similar hours.
- Launch peak imporatance is also relative to perception of launch price: when launch price is perceived as cheap players enter faster than when game is perceived as expensive (in that case more people wait for discounts and price cuts, which is used by some to frequently have discounts).
- Launch peak importance is also relative to if the game had a clean, polished launch or if it had many bugs, server issues, clearly unoptimized performance or other issues at launch. When there are important issues at launch that are expected to be fixed later many players wait to buy or play until they are fixed.
We know that the Insomniac leak documents are legit, so the Sony reported data in them too. You claim it's fake just because you don't like what they say. You don't have anything to prove they are fake and it was clear it was legit leaked data. Sony even took it down many images and videos from some places. The Sony data you posted is older, I posted the leaked one because it's newer so it shows more updated sales numbers.
You are the one who claims that data from Sony is "fake" or "misinformation", not me.
Regarding TLOU, it had important bugs/performance issues at launch, which should make some players wait until issues are fixed to buy or play them, reducing the representativity of the launch CCU peak vs total lifetime sales and also distort estimates made via usar reviews because they are buffed with bad reviews of angry people.
So that launch weekend CCU peak may represent a bit bigger % of launch sales than usual, and these sales should represent a smaller percent of total lifetime sales as usual since as I remember they took more than 3 weeks to fix the issue.
Who knows, Concord broke my crystal ball. In any case, GoWR continues as top 10 top selling Steam games, top 2 in trending games and top 3 in popular releases.