Busy with work at the moment so not sure when I’ll get a chance to do a proper dig and, to be honest, I’m not sure it would go much beyond looking at the growth in the game’s player base over the last few months anyway (which has limited value).
One thing I did notice while researching something the other day though is Shenmue 3’s impressive performance relative to Persona 5 Royal.
At the time of writing, P5R has 13,263 tracked users on PSN Profiles and 10,018 on PSN Trophy Leaders. Comparatively, Shenmue 3 has 4,543 and 5,083 respectively. Given the latter’s issues with tracking players who don’t unlock a single trophy though, these figures are probably closer to 5,679 and 6,354.
Persona 5 Royal had shifted 1.4m copies by July of this year, so assuming this number hasn’t increased too drastically and that the ratios of S3 to P5R players are accurate on the trophy sites, they suggest somewhere between 599,457 and 887,962 copies of S3 in circulation on PS4.
To be clear, I don’t think the ratios are right, but comparing S3 to other 1m+ releases typically yields results that are at least over the 250,000 copies mark - with some, like P5R, being considerably higher.
At this point, the only way I can see us finding out how many copies were sold is if the game breaks the 1m mark, somebody leaks the information or Sony accidentally release info that allows people to work out player totals like they did a few years back.