Sony Reveals Impressive ‘Bloodborne’ Sales Figures

Last month’s release of the PS4 exclusive “Bloodborne” represents the culmination of a journey which began on the PS3 with From Software’s “Demon’s Souls” and continued with “Dark Souls.” “Bloodborne” launched to wild critical success, and a new statement from Sony has announced that the game has sold through 1M units to consumers worldwide since its release.

The announcement was made by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan Studio producer, Masaaki Yamagiwa on the official PlayStation Blog. Yamagiwa thanked fans of “Bloodborne” for their patience, and added that the development team was hard at work on a performance enhancing patch intended to alleviate the long load times and frame stutter plaguing “Bloodborne.” Patch 1.03 is scheduled for release before the end of April.

“As we confirmed previously, the 1.03 update seeks to reduce certain load times in addition to performance optimizations. The patch also resolves an issue that resulted in abnormal game behavior after many continuous hours of play,” he said.

Shortly after launch, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry conducted an in-depth performance analysis of “Bloodborne.” The publication found that on a stock PS4 hard drive, load times were typically between 35 and 45 seconds long, an eternity for a game that involves so much dying, as well as trial and error based gameplay.

More troubling was the unstable performance of “Bloodborne,” which runs into severe difficulty when attempting to maintain a 30fps refresh during multiplayer mode. Digital Foundry notes that multiplayer can result in extremely harsh dips in the game’s fluidity and responsiveness, down to below the 20fps mark. While the single player mode generally manages a 30fps update, problems with incorrect frame ordering mean gameplay is hampered by perceptible judder.

Despite the technical hiccups, “Bloodborne” was met with near universal critical acclaim. The game currently holds a 93 score on game review aggregator Metacritic, making it one of the highest rated PS4 exclusives. IGN rated the game a 9.1/10 in its review, praising the game’s gorgeous art design, tactical combat, boss and level design, while noting the title’s framerate and load time problems.