In-Depth: PlayStation Network Sales Analysis, April - June, 2011

[Console digital editor Ryan Langley examines PlayStation Network's debuts and successes during the months of April, May and June 2011, using leaderboard and chart data to analyze their sales and downloads.] Well it's been a while, hasn't it? Months have passed since we've been able to check back into the PlayStation Network for its Leaderboards, thanks to the whole service being brought down by a hacker intrusion. We're even a bit late now, having delayed this to August. Still, we're here to get the data to you, and thanks to the help of those from PSNStores.com, we're able to give you all the data we can muster. There were a lot of releases, but not a whole lot of games we could follow, so it may not be the most helpful list in the world -- it's still worth checking out, though. April Seems Like Such A Long Time Ago Over the past few months there have been plenty of new releases, but only seven titles we could follow. One of the titles released in April was Gameloft's Dungeon Hunter: Alliance, an online cooperative dungeon crawler that was put out way back in April. Over the three months, it was able to grab 86,549 players, which is very good all things considered. Fancy Pants Adventures from Electronic Arts was released just prior to the network collapse, and has since picked up 23,130 players. Back Into The Swing Of Things Once the service came back up, we had a splurge of new titles -- 16 to be exact. The only title of real note is Magic: The Gathering 2012, which was released on time alongside the Xbox Live Arcade version. In just three weeks, the game added 55,644 players, with the XBLA version seeing 134,677 players. One of the few PSN exclusives we could follow was PomPom Games' Alien Zombie Mega Death, expanding on the original Minis title. Unfortunately it seems to have been lost among the flood of releases, and only added 2,587 players in its few weeks after debuting. We also saw two new pieces of downloadable content for Marvel Pinball. After just a few days, the Captain America DLC has already garnered 8,275 players. No Leaderboards, But Quality Presides While we might not have the Leaderboards for all games, we can at the very least see how the critics look at them. The PlayStation Network was blessed with some quality titles -- Outland, Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes, and Beyond Good & Evil HD, all with scores of more than 80 on Metacritic. It was interesting to see some releases not even get the chance to be rated on Metacritic -- even something like Dragon's Lair II, which is at least fairly well known. First Half Of The Year, 2011 Despite the month off, we are still able to look back at the last six months of sales for the PlayStation Network. Those that are blue were part of the "Welcome Back" promotion on PlayStation Plus for a short period of time -- clearly the numbers go up quite a bit, and hopefully the developers got a good deal out of being part of those promotions. Ultimately, there were not a whole lot of sales for older titles, most seeing less than 10,000 in total, but the majority of bigger named titles didn't have any leaderboards at all, so this is but a slice of a much bigger pie. Onto July Now that we're on the right path, we can actually have a look at single months in the PlayStation Network's life. With games like Limbo and Deadliest Warriors: Legends, we might see some big sales in the coming months.