Phantom Blade Zero Pre-Order Tracker: 386K Steam Copies and $18.5M Estimated a Month Before Launch

As of September 29, 2026, exactly one month remains before Phantom Blade Zero unlocks on October 29. On that day, the analytics firm Alinea Analytics published a fresh set of pre-launch estimates in its email newsletter: roughly 386,000 copies sold on Steam pre-order, generating about $18.5 million in revenue, with the game sitting on approximately 2.4 million Steam wishlists and 110,000 followers. This is the most recent systematic estimate available in public channels since the August figures — the "300K copies in the first week" numbers from August 20 — and it is the starting reading for the final month before release.

This article puts the new numbers side by side with the August baseline, breaks down what the past month added, and explains how to read the most quoted figure of the bunch: the roughly 16% wishlist-to-pre-order conversion rate. For a line-by-line source analysis of the August numbers, see the earlier pre-order record breakdown; this piece only adds the month-over-month comparison and does not repeat that article's estimate details.

The latest estimate: 386K copies, $18.5M

In its September 29 newsletter, Alinea Analytics listed the following numbers for Phantom Blade Zero: approximately 386,000 pre-orders sold on Steam, about $18.5 million in revenue, roughly 2.4 million wishlists, and around 110,000 followers. The figures appear in the newsletter's section on fourth-quarter releases worth watching, as the reading for the game one month before launch. By the official schedule, the game launches on PS5 and Steam on October 29, 2026.

Compared with the mid-August estimates, the movement is easy to see:

One caveat on that "change" column: it is derived by subtracting the two estimates directly. Alinea did not publish a separate figure for the monthly increment, so the deltas inherit any estimation error on both ends. All three metrics are Steam-only, and both snapshots come from the same firm, which keeps the comparison internally consistent.

After the newsletter went out, several gaming outlets retold the numbers around September 30. Notebookcheck's headline framed it as "close to $20M" earned on Steam before release, while OtakuKart's headline focused on the 16% conversion figure. Both articles are retellings of Alinea's estimates rather than independent counts, and this article treats the Alinea newsletter itself as the source of record. Where a headline rounds $18.5M up to "close to $20M", the newsletter's own number remains the one to cite.

A note on which figures can be checked directly: wishlists and followers are visible on the public Steam store page at any time. Copies sold and revenue have no public counter — the store page never displays pre-order volume, so any figure for them, including the 386K and the $18.5M, can only come from an estimation model. That is also why the two families of numbers age differently: wishlists can be verified against the page whenever needed, while the sales estimates wait for the next estimate to supersede them.

The ~16% wishlist-to-pre-order conversion, read carefully

The 16% figure has a simple origin: roughly 386,000 pre-orders divided by roughly 2.4 million Steam wishlists comes out to about sixteen percent. Alinea's newsletter hedges the number as "16%-ish" and makes a point of emphasizing that this conversion level exists "before the game is even out" — that is, paid commitments at this scale arrived while the product is still unreleased.

The comparison case comes from the same newsletter. Galactic Racer, a sci-fi racing game also slated for the fourth-quarter window, holds around 800,000 wishlists but had sold fewer than 50,000 copies pre-launch, a conversion rate below 6%. By Alinea's math, Phantom Blade Zero's conversion is roughly three times higher. The same passage adds Alinea's side commentary on the racing game: at $59.99 it sits outside the impulse-purchase zone, and console sales will likely have to carry it. That commentary belongs to the competitor's story, but the useful takeaway for this one is the yardstick it provides: similar wishlist scale, very different paid conversion.

One boundary matters when reading the 16%. It is an observed ratio between pre-orders that have already happened and the current wishlist stock — a measure of how much of the interested audience has converted to paying so far, not a formula for predicting final sales. Wishlists are free bookmark actions, and converting a wishlist total directly into a sales forecast is a well-known misreading; the earlier 3 million wishlists article goes through this in detail. Conversion behavior varies enormously by game, by price point, and by release window, and the industry has no reliable formula that turns wishlist totals into launch sales. The value of the 16% is comparative: at this specific point before launch, it shows what share of the Steam audience has already paid, and it gives future trackers a baseline to measure against.

Alinea's newsletter closes with a market-scale comparison it had developed in August: the wuxia action-RPG, in its words, ticks many of the same boxes as Black Myth: Wukong — "its most obvious spiritual predecessor as the next big Chinese action game" — and will be huge in China, "albeit not as big as that." The qualifier is the firm's own, and it is consistent with the calibrated framing of the August coverage.

Where the past month's 86K copies came from

Between August 20 and September 29, five weeks passed without any major new marketing beat for Phantom Blade Zero. The most recent entry in the game's official Steam news feed remains the August 13 pre-order announcement, and the dedicated State of Play broadcast dates back to August 18. The growth window contained no new trailer drop and no new showcase.

The biggest official move of the period came on September 17, when S-GAME announced that wishlists had surpassed 3 million across all platforms. Under Alinea's Steam-only accounting, wishlists grew from about 1.6 million to about 2.4 million over the same stretch. These two numbers do not contradict each other, and which coverage belongs to which figure was already laid out in the earlier wishlist breakdown.

Laid out as a timeline, the same window looks like this:

Alinea's newsletter also revisits the timing of the pre-order opening — the button and the trailer arriving on the same day, which the firm calls a smart move. The newsletter also quotes, once again, S-Game's earlier statement that pre-orders "far exceeded expectations." That quote was verified during the August coverage of the pre-order record, and the September newsletter reuses it as the summary of the game's pre-order trajectory.

Sources and boundaries: what is estimated, what is official

Every number in this article falls into one of three buckets, and keeping them separate prevents most misreadings.

The first bucket is third-party estimates: the 386K copies, $18.5M, 2.4M wishlists, 110K followers, and the 16% conversion rate all come from a single firm's model — Alinea Analytics. S-GAME has never published an exact pre-order count or revenue figure. The August 300K and $14.5M numbers are the same kind of object; when media outlets reported "300,000 pre-orders" in August, the ultimate source was that same estimate.

The second bucket is official figures: the 3 million+ all-platform wishlist milestone from September 17, and the October 29 release date itself. The official side has its own trail to check: the one-million wishlists thank-you letter went up on Steam on December 29, 2025, and the three-million announcement followed on September 17, 2026. Both are statements of totals rather than breakdowns — no platform split, no conversion data, and no pre-order counts — which is precisely why the estimates keep a role even when official numbers exist. PS5-side pre-order counts and revenue have never been disclosed, and third-party tracking covers Steam almost exclusively, so console sales remain a blind spot in every one of these statistics.

The third bucket is derived values: the 16% conversion rate and each "change" entry in the table above are computed between estimated figures. They inherit the uncertainty of their inputs and should be read as order-of-magnitude references.

Two common confusions are worth defusing. First, the $18.5M is an estimate of pre-order revenue, not a final sales result; first-week sales after October 29 will start adding new numbers on top of it. Second, the Alinea newsletter itself writes the release date as October 28 — that is the Steam storefront's display date for Americas-region time zones, while the official date remains October 29. Both refer to the same unlock moment, which the PlayStation Store stamps at 02:00 UTC; the unlock times article covers the conversion in detail, and the release date overview collects the confirmed launch facts in one place.

One month out, the tracker's next update will most likely arrive after launch, when pre-orders stop being the story and first-week sales take over. Between now and October 29, the chances of an official number are limited but real: S-GAME has used milestone announcements before — the one-million wishlists thank-you letter in December 2025 and the three-million announcement in September — and a pre-launch sales or wishlist update could land at any point in the final month. Any such disclosure would immediately become the anchor figure, with the estimates falling back to the gap-filling role they held before September 17. If nothing is announced, the September 29 snapshot stands as the final pre-launch reading, and the first post-launch estimate will fold the pre-order total into a much larger launch-week number. Until then, these estimates are the finest-grained public picture of how the game's commercial start is shaping up — and 386K copies at 16% conversion is, by every comparison point available, a strong position to launch from.