In a genuinely stunning blow to SNK’s attempt to revive both their reputation and their signature fighting game series, the newly-released Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves has performed absolutely abysmally in its home region, having sold less than 9,000 copies to Japanese players across its first two weeks on release.
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Hitting the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC platforms via the Steam and Epic Games Stores on April 24th, the new Fatal Fury entry seemed like a surefire hit on paper.
Not only did it stand to revive a once-massively popular fighting game series at a time when Capcom is really the only other developer giving any dedicated attention to the genre, but it also stood to deliver an old-school arcade experience via its addition of rollback netcode, and out-of-left field choices of guest characters in the form of comedic Swedish DJ Salvatore Ganacci and one of the greatest footballers of all time, Cristiano Ronaldo.
Heck, even before its release, City of Wolves was announced as one of the eight games to have a main stage tournament included as part of this year’s EVO fighting game competition circuit.
Unfortunately for SNK, it seems their latest effort has been a complete miss with players in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Per sales data provided by Japanese video game news outlet Famitsu, local retailers sold just 5,067 physical copies of City of the Wolves‘ for the PS5 release and 2,599 for the PS4 – a total of 7,666 units – in its first week of release (April 21st – 27th).
Things sadly didn’t get any better from there, as in its second week (April 28, 2025 – May 4, 2025), Terry Bogard’s latest outing moved just 1,235 copies, all for the PS4.
In summary, over its first eleven days of availability, the Japanese release of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves has sold a measly 8,901 physical copies, with 5,067 being picked up by PS5 players and 3,834 by those still rocking a PS4.
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Though Famitsu’s number exclude the whole of City of Wolves‘ digital-only PC sales, publicly available numbers confirm the game is not fairing any better on the platform.
Per numbers provided by analytics outlet SteamDB, the game’s peak player count on the eponymous platform currently rests at 4,674, which it achieved on launch day.
Since then, each subsequent day has seen the game post a lower and lower peak player count, with the most recent peak, as recorded for May 14th, coming in at only 1,016.
Given that the game is still less than a month old, there unfortunately does not yet exist enough data to analyze just why Japanese players gave barely any attention to SNK’s latest.
To this end, while unlikely to completely propel City of Wolves to ‘#1 Best Seller’ status, it will be interesting to see just how well the fighter is performing in Latin America given both SNK’s overall popularity in the area and Ronaldo’s appearance as a playable character.
It also remains to be seen if the game will experience any sort of future uptick in Japanese interest, especially with Street Fighter mainstays Ken and Chun-Li set to eventually join the fray as DLC.
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