Phantom Blade Zero Won October's PlayStation Players' Choice: What the Vote and the Charts Around It Measure

On November 11, the Players' Choice page on PlayStation Blog updated with October's result: Phantom Blade Zero was voted the best new game released that month. The verdict itself runs to two sentences. But October also left two other records behind — a PlayStation Store download chart and Steam's weekly top-seller list — and the three only become readable when they are put side by side, because each one counts something different.

The result page says one thing, and the rules sit underneath

The two lines PlayStation Blog published are short. The first is a greeting: "Ready, set, Wuxia action." The second is the result: "Your votes have spoken: Phantom Blade Zero wins Players' Choice for October. Congrats to S-Game!" The post is credited to O'Dell Harmon Jr., a content communication specialist at Sony Interactive Entertainment.

The page's own metadata explains its shape. Its address is the entry page for October's vote, first published on November 2 and last modified on November 11 — the result replaced the open poll in that later edit. So the page spent nine days collecting votes before the verdict replaced the poll.

Underneath the result, the same page carries the standing explanation of how the award works, and four points matter more than the rest:

• Cadence: at the end of every month, PlayStation Blog opens a poll for the best new game released that month. When voting closes, the tally is announced on the blog and on PlayStation's social channels.
• The question: voters are asked one thing only — if you could recommend just one new release to a friend that month, which would it be.
• The ballot: the PlayStation Blog editorial team gathers that month's most noteworthy releases and uses that list to seed the poll. The nominees are an editorial selection, not an open submission.
• Eligibility: re-released games do not qualify, but remakes do. The page defines a remake as an ambitious, larger-scale rebuild and offers Resident Evil 4 (2023) and Final Fantasy VII Remake as examples.

Those four lines settle what kind of award this is. It is a reader preference poll run by a platform holder's editorial team. It is not a review score, it is not a sales chart, and it is not a vote open to every PlayStation owner — it is open to whoever chooses to visit the blog and click.

October's field: five titles named, no vote counts published

The post names five of October's bigger releases while setting the scene: Castlevania: Belmont's Curse, Phantom Blade Zero, Silver Pines, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. The same five appear in a November 11 report by the Russian outlet PlayGround.ru, which lists them as the poll's leading contenders and puts the ballot at 28 games across genres. That figure of 28 comes from PlayGround.ru's account; the PlayStation Blog page does not state how many games were on the ballot.

What the page does not publish matters as much as what it does. There is no vote total, no percentage, no runner-up and no turnout figure. That rules out any claim that the win was a landslide, or that it reflects the preference of PlayStation owners at large. The only statement the page supports is the result itself: the game readers voted the best new release of October was Phantom Blade Zero.

One timing detail sharpens the result. Phantom Blade Zero unlocked on October 29 at 02:00 UTC, which is the evening of October 28 on the US west coast, so it spent just under three days of October on sale before the month the poll was judging came to an end. However long the ballot was, the winner had only those days to make its case to voters.

The PS5 download chart: fourth in both US/Canada and Europe

The second official record comes from the PlayStation Store's monthly download chart, published on November 4. In the October PS5 ranking, Phantom Blade Zero sits fourth in both the US/Canada and Europe lists. The top three are Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, BeamNG.drive and EA Sports FC 27 — the same three titles in both regions, with the second and third places swapped.

Two caveats come with the chart, both from its own footnotes. It counts purchases made on the PlayStation Store, with upgrades excluded, and product naming can differ between regions. It also covers PlayStation only: a Steam or Epic purchase never appears in it, no matter how large.

The October post carries separate lists for PS4, PS VR2 and free-to-play titles as well, and Phantom Blade Zero appears only on the PS5 one. Two titles that the poll post named as October contenders do show up on that same PS5 chart, but nowhere near the top: Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is ninth in the US/Canada list and fourteenth in Europe, while Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is sixteenth in the US/Canada list and absent from the European top 20. Silver Pines, the third October contender named in the poll post, is on neither list. A vote and a purchase chart can order the same month's releases very differently, and both can still be accurate.

Steam's weekly chart: first, then second

The Steam-side record comes from SteamDB's global top-seller list, which the site publishes to Steam's news feed every week. For the week of October 27 to November 3, Phantom Blade Zero was first. For the week of November 3 to November 10, it dropped to second, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 taking the top spot. Both lists note that free-to-play games are excluded.

The week-45 list also places Charting the Unknown, the paid expansion for Crimson Desert Enhanced, eighth while the base game sits sixth. SteamDB counts paid expansions alongside full games, so a title's neighbours on this chart are not always other games.

The largest moves between the two weeks belong to Football Manager 27, which climbed from tenth to third, and Moon Sweepers, which fell from fourth to eighth. Phantom Blade Zero's own change is a single place. The two feed posts give no revenue figure and no unit count, so the table records order, not distance.

The feed posts carry ten entries each and link out to a top-100 version of the same list on SteamDB. One more SteamDB number belongs to the same window without belonging to the chart: the site logged a concurrent-player peak of 833,921 on November 1, inside the release week that the week-45 list covers. That is a count of simultaneous players, not copies sold, and it plays no part in the seller ranking.

What each ranking measures, and what it cannot

The three data sets come from three different counting systems, and reading them as one number produces errors in both directions.

The reader poll measures preference. It answers "which of these would you recommend this month", among people motivated enough to visit PlayStation Blog and vote. Neither the size of that group nor its regional spread is published. It cannot be converted into sales, and it is not a quality score; critic scores are a separate ledger, and the launch-window numbers — Metacritic 88 and OpenCritic 91 — are in the review roundup.

The Store chart measures purchase rank inside one storefront, so it locates the game among PlayStation buyers in a single month without saying anything about the global total.

The Steam chart measures revenue rank. SteamDB orders the list by revenue rather than units, so a $59.99 game and a cheaper title sitting on the same list are not separated by copies sold; the list also drops free-to-play entries. Like the other two, it publishes no absolute figure.

That is why "best of October" and "second on Steam" are not in tension. One is a reader vote, one is a revenue ranking; the populations, the samples and the time windows differ. The Store chart covers a calendar month, the Steam list covers a Tuesday-to-Tuesday week, and the poll is open for a stretch that begins after the month it judges has already ended. A game can look stronger on one and weaker on another without any underlying behaviour changing. The hard numbers still come from two places only: the studio's own announcement of more than 4 million copies in the first 72 hours, recorded in the 72-hour sales and player-count breakdown, and estimates from the third-party analytics firm Alinea Analytics, which put the figure at about 4.3 million copies and roughly $223 million in revenue. How those copies split between PS5 and PC has not been published by anyone. The movement in Steam review scores is a separate thread and has no bearing on chart position.

Timeline

One more line on the page points forward: readers are invited to predict November's winner in the comments. Another month of releases will feed the same poll, and the weekly Steam chart and the monthly Store chart will keep updating on their own schedules. Each one reports its own kind of number, and none of them will stand in for a sales figure.