Today is the fifth anniversary of the release of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. In a post to celebrate the occasion, developer Naughty Dog revealed Uncharted 4 had reached 37 million players as of May 2021. The game also managed to rustle up over 13 million multiplayer players.
The last we heard from Uncharted 4 back in October 2019, the game had sold more than 16 million copies worldwide. It was the fastest selling PlayStation 4 exclusive in the UK until it was dethroned by The Last of Us Part II in June 2020.Uncharted 4 was a part of the PlayStation Plus Instant Games Collection in April 2020, which is likely the main reason for such an impressive increase in downloads since then. It’s also part of the PS Plus Collection for PS5 players.
Naughty Dog revealed some other interesting figures for the game as of its May 2021 fifth anniversary:
- 13.3 million multiplayer players
- 9.5 million players used an accessibility option
- 9.8 million played with the lemur in the market
- 7.5 million players played Marco Polo (again)
- 2 million players climbed to the very top of the Clocktower
- 12 million players hit all the targets in the attic with the toy gun
- 2 million took a photo of Sully
Game Director Vinit Agarwal explained the game’s multiplayer was meant to emphasize “the lighthearted nature of the franchise,” evoking a sense of teamwork and camaraderie that wasn’t present in the campaign, especially when Sam, Nathan, Sully, and Elena teamed up to take on the villains. The mode managed to reunite characters from all of the games in the franchise, such as Lazarević from Uncharted 2:
The other big goal was trying to honor Uncharted as a franchise. We added a lot of the Mystical items from the previous Uncharted games, which weren’t present in Uncharted 4. In a lot of ways, Uncharted 4 Multiplayer was an homage to Uncharted as a brand.
Uncharted 4 was the first game Naughty Dog developed exclusively for the PS4 console. There hasn’t been a new numbered game in the series for five years (except Uncharted: Lost Legacy, which came out a year later in 2017), although Bend Studio was reportedly once working on a reboot of the franchise before internal discontent led to the team moving on to their own original title. The Bend Uncharted game is assumed to have since been scrapped, so fans will instead have to make do with the upcoming Tom Holland-starring Uncharted movie that has finished filming and is due to be released in February 2022.
[Source: Naughty Dog, Twitter]