France’s weekly retail charts just delivered one of the more unusual top-three lineups of 2026: a survival-horror sequel, a two-decade-old stealth franchise remaster, and a big-budget Star Wars strategy game, all launching into the top five in the same seven-day window. According to data published by SELL, the French publishers’ trade body that supplies the country’s official retail sales figures, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy debuted in first place on the French charts for week 34 of 2026, with Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 and Star Wars Zero Company following directly behind in second and third place respectively, as first reported by VGChartz.
The triple debut is notable less for any single title’s performance and more for what it says about the state of the French retail market heading into the final quarter of 2026: three separate publishers, three separate genres, and three separate platform strategies converged on the same chart week, pushing established juggernauts like Elden Ring and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream down the rankings. This piece breaks down what actually happened, why it matters for the wider games industry, and what the numbers suggest about how French buyers are spending their money as the pre-holiday release calendar accelerates.
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What Happened: The Week 34 French Charts Breakdown
Per VGChartz’s report, which cites SELL as the source of the underlying retail data, the top five overall positions on the French charts for week 34, 2026 shifted dramatically compared to the prior week. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy took the top spot outright. Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 landed in second. Star Wars Zero Company rounded out the podium in third. Elden Ring, which had dropped out of the top five in a previous week, re-entered at fourth place, likely aided by continued interest following the recent cross-platform Tarnished Pack launch, while Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, which had held the number one position the prior week, slid all the way down to fifth.
That is a near-total turnover of the top five in a single week, something that does not happen often on a mature retail chart like France’s, where evergreen titles such as Minecraft, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and EA Sports FC 26 typically occupy the lower-platform lists for months at a time. The scale of the shakeup underlines just how much release-week clustering can distort short-term retail data, and it is a pattern retailers and publishers in France will be watching closely as more high-profile titles stack up ahead of the winter shopping season.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy Takes the Top Spot
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is the sequel-slash-legacy entry in Asobo Studio’s plague-and-rats survival series, and its debut at number one across the overall French charts was mirrored on individual platform charts too. On PlayStation 5, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy was the best-selling title in France for the week, ahead of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 and Star Wars Zero Company. On Xbox Series X|S, the picture was almost identical: Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy topped the platform-specific list as well, meaning the game claimed the number-one retail slot on both current-generation consoles in the same market during the same week, a rare feat for any single release.
The game’s momentum is not limited to physical retail. On Steam, tracking site SteamDB recorded an all-time concurrent-player peak for Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy of 5,468 players on August 29, 2026, with the title also ranking inside the top sellers and top wishlist charts on the platform at the time of that snapshot. The game’s soundtrack has separately built its own commercial footprint: composer Olivier Deriviere’s original score for Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy entered the France iTunes Top Albums chart as a new entry, according to chart-tracking site Kworb, a crossover moment that is unusual for a game soundtrack and speaks to how the Plague Tale series has cultivated a fanbase well beyond the core gaming press.
For context on how the franchise has grown, Asobo’s original A Plague Tale: Innocence and its 2022 sequel A Plague Tale: Requiem built a reputation as one of the more critically respected mid-budget narrative series of the past decade, and this week’s French chart-topping debut suggests that goodwill has translated directly into first-week sales momentum in one of the series’ strongest home markets, given Asobo Studio’s French origins.
Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 Lands at Number Two
The second-place finisher, Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, extends Konami’s ongoing strategy of repackaging its stealth-action back catalogue for current-generation hardware. On the French PlayStation 5 chart, the collection placed second, directly behind Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy and ahead of Star Wars Zero Company. On Xbox Series X|S, the collection’s ranking slipped to third, trailing both Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy and Star Wars Zero Company on that platform specifically, an indication that the collection’s buyer base in France skews more toward PlayStation than Xbox, consistent with the platform-loyalty patterns Metal Gear Solid has shown historically in European markets.
The first Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection, released in 2023, bundled together the original trilogy plus supporting materials, and it drew a mixed reception at launch over technical shortcomings on some ports even as fans welcomed the long-overdue re-release of Konami’s stealth catalogue. Volume 2’s own five-platform launch earlier this year already gave Konami a broader install base to draw from heading into this week’s French chart debut. A second volume charting this strongly in France suggests Konami has managed to convert at least some of that goodwill into sustained commercial interest, and it reinforces a broader trend across the industry: remaster and remake compilations of beloved franchises continue to perform well at retail even when the underlying games are decades old, provided the presentation and bundling are handled competently.
Star Wars Zero Company Rounds Out the Top Three
Star Wars Zero Company, the tactics-driven strategy title set in the Star Wars universe, debuted in third place overall on the French charts. Its platform-level performance was actually stronger on Xbox Series X|S, where it placed second, sitting between Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy at first and Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 at third. On PlayStation 5, Star Wars Zero Company held third place, behind both of its chart rivals that week.
Star Wars Zero Company has also shown strength beyond French retail. VGChartz separately reported that the game debuted in first place on global Steam charts, a signal that its commercial performance is not confined to any single territory, a claim independently corroborated by chart-tracking outlet Gamalive, which recorded Star Wars Zero Company sitting at rank one on a French Steam top-20 chart on August 31, 2026 â a result the game’s publisher, Lucasfilm Games, will be watching closely as it plans future Star Wars titles. That is a meaningful data point for LucasFilm Games and its development partners, given how mixed critical and commercial reception has been for several Star Wars games released over the past five years. That commercial showing also arrives despite a rocky development road: developer Bit Reactor furloughed the bulk of its staff shortly after launch amid a broader financing crunch, and early PC benchmark testing flagged a wide frame-rate spread across hardware tiers. A tactics title debuting at the top of both a major European retail chart and a global digital storefront in the same week suggests the strategy genre still has a receptive audience within the Star Wars fanbase, even as the license’s mainline action titles have had a rockier run.
Full Platform-by-Platform Breakdown
SELL’s data, as relayed by VGChartz, also captured top sellers across every major platform sold at French retail that week, not just the three current-generation systems dominating headlines. The table below consolidates the full platform breakdown for week 34, 2026.
| Platform | #1 Seller | #2 Seller | #3 Seller |
|---|---|---|---|
| PlayStation 5 | Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy | Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 | Star Wars Zero Company |
| Xbox Series X|S | Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy | Star Wars Zero Company | Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 |
| Nintendo Switch 2 | Elden Ring | Mario Kart World | PokÃĐmon Pokopia |
| Nintendo Switch | Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream | Minecraft | Mario Kart 8 Deluxe |
| PlayStation 4 | Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection | The Last of Us Remastered | EA Sports FC 26 |
| Xbox One | Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered | Grand Theft Auto V | Hogwarts Legacy |
| PC (retail) | Minecraft | Farming Simulator 25 | F1 2021 |
What stands out in this fuller picture is how split the French market currently is by generation. The overall top three, driven by Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, and Star Wars Zero Company, is entirely a current-generation, current-release phenomenon. Meanwhile, the last-generation PlayStation 4 and Xbox One charts are still being carried by catalogue titles, several of them years old, underscoring that a meaningful slice of French console buyers have not yet migrated off older hardware even as Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S dominate new-release headlines.
Why Three Different Genres Converged in the Same Week
It is unusual for a survival-narrative sequel, a stealth-action remaster collection, and a tactical strategy game to all launch into the same chart window, but publisher release scheduling in the run-up to Q4 is rarely coordinated between companies. What likely happened is simpler: three unrelated publishers each picked a late-summer release slot to avoid direct competition with the flood of AAA titles expected in the run-up to the holidays, and all three slots happened to land in the same SELL reporting week.
That scheduling logic is common in the industry. Publishers generally try to avoid launching a major release the same week as a title from a rival mega-franchise, but they have far less visibility into, or control over, when competitors in adjacent genres are shipping. A horror-survival sequel, a stealth compilation, and a strategy game do not directly compete for the same buyer’s wallet in the way that two open-world action titles might, so there was little competitive pressure pushing any of the three publishers to shift their release date. The result is a chart week where three genuinely different audiences all showed up to buy games in the same seven-day period, inflating the appearance of a single blockbuster week when in reality it was three smaller, non-overlapping launches stacking on top of each other.
Market Impact: What This Means for Publishers and Retailers
For Asobo Studio and its publishing partner, a number-one French debut is a strong signal in the studio’s home market, and French retail performance often gets used internally by European publishers as an early proxy for how a title will perform across the broader Francophone and Southern European territories in the following weeks. For Konami, a second volume of the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection charting inside the French top three suggests the compilation strategy for the studio’s classic catalogue still has commercial legs, which matters as Konami continues to lean on legacy IP re-releases alongside newer projects.
For LucasFilm Games and the Star Wars license more broadly, Star Wars Zero Company’s top-three French retail debut, combined with its reported number-one position on global Steam charts, is arguably the more consequential result of the three. Star Wars as a gaming license has had an uneven run over the past several years, and a strategy title landing strongly in two very different sales channels, physical retail in a major European market and global digital storefronts, gives the license a data point it can point to when planning future Star Wars game investments.
Retailers in France, meanwhile, benefit from having three simultaneous new releases to merchandise rather than a single dominant title soaking up all the shelf space and marketing budget. A more evenly distributed top three, compared to a chart dominated entirely by one blockbuster, generally correlates with healthier overall category revenue for physical retailers during that reporting week, since it reduces the risk of a single title’s underperformance dragging down the whole week’s numbers.
Historical Context: How French Charts Have Behaved in 2026
This week’s shakeup did not happen in a vacuum. VGChartz’s ongoing weekly coverage of the French charts throughout 2026, all sourced from SELL data, has tracked a string of other single-week disruptions this year, including debut weeks for titles such as Splatoon Raiders, Crimson Desert, and Beast of Reincarnation earlier in the year. That pattern, frequent single-week disruptions followed by a return to catalogue-title stability, is fairly typical of how the French charts have behaved for years: big new releases spike hard for one to two weeks and then fade as catalogue titles and long-tail evergreen franchises reassert themselves in the lower half of the top ten.
What differentiates week 34 from most of those earlier disruptions is the sheer number of new entries landing simultaneously. A single blockbuster knocking a chart leader down a spot is routine. Three simultaneous debuts occupying the entire top three, while pushing both the previous week’s leader and a returning classic like Elden Ring into fourth and fifth, is a comparatively rare configuration, and it is the kind of chart week that retail analysts tend to flag as an outlier rather than a new baseline.
Competitive Comparison: How the Three Titles Stack Up
Comparing the three chart-topping titles side by side highlights just how different their commercial profiles are, despite landing in the same three chart positions during the same week. The table below summarizes what is publicly known about each title’s chart performance and cross-platform footprint this week.
| Title | French Overall Rank | PS5 Rank (France) | Xbox Series X|S Rank (France) | Other Notable Chart Signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy | 1st | 1st | 1st | Steam all-time concurrent peak of 5,468 players (Aug. 29, 2026, per SteamDB); soundtrack entered France iTunes Top Albums |
| Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 | 2nd | 2nd | 3rd | Sequel to the 2023 Master Collection Vol. 1 compilation |
| Star Wars Zero Company | 3rd | 3rd | 2nd | Reported number-one debut on global Steam charts, per VGChartz |
The genre split is the most telling part of this comparison. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a single-player narrative survival game, Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 is a legacy-catalogue compilation aimed at longtime stealth-genre fans and newcomers alike, and Star Wars Zero Company is a squad-based tactics title. None of the three are competing head-to-head for the same core audience, which is precisely why all three could debut strongly in the same week without visibly cannibalizing each other’s sales.
The Bigger Picture: France as a Bellwether Market
France is one of the largest video game markets in Europe, and SELL’s weekly retail data is closely watched by publishers as an early indicator of how a release is tracking relative to internal forecasts. That data can carry real financial specificity: SELL’s monthly “Essentiel Jeu VidÃĐo” bulletins have previously broken out figures showing NBA 2K25 alone generated âŽ4,426,466 in French sales in March 2025, illustrating just how granular and closely tracked the country’s retail figures are. Because VGChartz’s French coverage runs every week without exception, sudden reshuffles like this one stand out clearly against the otherwise fairly predictable rhythm of catalogue titles holding steady positions for months. A studio like Asobo, headquartered in Bordeaux, has an obvious home-market advantage in France that would not necessarily replicate in the UK, Germany, or the US, so publishers and analysts reading this week’s numbers will need to be careful not to overextrapolate French retail performance into a global sales forecast for any of the three titles.
At the same time, a chart week this disrupted does tend to ripple into subsequent weekly reports, and in this case it did: VGChartz confirmed that in week 35, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy did reclaim the number-one spot on both the French PS5 and Xbox Series X|S charts that September 2026, exactly the kind of sustained, cross-platform demand analysts look for after a stacked launch week. That lead proved short-lived, however â by week 36, The Blood of Dawnwalker had already dethroned it, debuting as the new PS5 and Xbox Series X|S chart leader in France the same September, per VGChartz, a reminder of how quickly chart leadership can rotate even for a strong opening week. Whether Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 and Star Wars Zero Company can show similar follow-through remains the more open question, and it underscores that one strong week, even two, is not the same as durable, multi-month chart presence.
What Retailers and Analysts Will Be Watching Next
The next SELL-sourced weekly report, covering week 35 of 2026, will be the clearest indicator of staying power for all three titles. A few specific signals are worth tracking. First, whether Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy can hold its number-one position on both PS5 and Xbox Series X|S simultaneously for a second straight week, which would suggest genuinely broad-based demand rather than a single strong launch week driven by pre-orders converting at once. Second, whether Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2’s stronger PlayStation showing relative to Xbox persists, which would reinforce the idea that Konami’s stealth catalogue skews toward a PlayStation-loyal audience in France specifically. Third, whether Star Wars Zero Company’s global Steam chart-topping run translates into a second strong week on PC storefronts more broadly, beyond the single-platform Steam data point currently available.
Predictions: Where the French Charts Go From Here
Based on how similar chart disruptions have played out earlier in 2026 and in prior years, a few outcomes look likely heading into the next several weekly reports.
- Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy will likely remain inside the French top five for at least two to three additional weeks, consistent with how prior Asobo Studio releases have performed in the developer’s home market, before catalogue titles begin reclaiming the top positions.
- Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2’s PlayStation-leaning performance is likely to persist in subsequent weeks, given the franchise’s historically stronger association with PlayStation hardware across European markets.
- Star Wars Zero Company’s strategy-genre positioning means it is unlikely to sustain a top-three overall French retail rank for more than a few weeks, since tactics games typically see steeper post-launch sales drop-off at physical retail than narrative or action titles, even when digital performance remains strong.
- Elden Ring’s return to the French top five in fourth place is likely to prove durable rather than temporary, given the title’s history of resurging on charts around any new content, platform, or edition news.
- Expect additional single-week chart disruptions through the rest of Q3 and into Q4 2026 as more publishers stack releases ahead of the holiday shopping season â a pattern that was already playing out by mid-September 2026, when NBA 2K27 pushed simultaneously into the top three on both the French PS5 and Xbox Series X|S charts per VGChartz, while on Steam specifically, The Blood of Dawnwalker climbed to third on the French-language top-sellers list by September 10, 2026, and WARDOGS took the number-one spot on a French Steam top-20 chart by September 15, 2026, both according to Gamalive. This week’s turnover is more likely a preview of a busy release calendar than an isolated event, even as the wider industry works through the layoffs and studio contractions that have shadowed 2026’s release calendar.
How This Compares to Past French Chart-Topping Debuts
VGChartz’s weekly French coverage throughout 2026 has documented several other debut-driven disruptions, including chart-topping weeks for titles like Crimson Desert and Beast of Reincarnation. What sets the week 34 report apart is the multi-genre nature of the disruption. Most single-week chart takeovers in France tend to be driven by one dominant release with the rest of the top five holding steady from the prior week. Having three new entries simultaneously claim the top three spots, while also pushing a heavyweight like Elden Ring back into the mix from outside the top five, is a comparatively unusual configuration even by the standards of a market that sees frequent weekly turnover.
What This Means for Buyers
For consumers, this week’s charts are less a signal to rush out and buy any specific title and more a useful snapshot of what is resonating in the French market right now. Buyers weighing Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy against Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 or Star Wars Zero Company are, in practice, choosing between three very different kinds of games rather than three competing versions of the same experience. Anyone tracking the broader release calendar around these titles should also expect pricing and bundle promotions to shift quickly once first-week retail momentum data like this becomes public, since retailers in France frequently adjust discounting and shelf placement based on exactly the kind of weekly SELL figures reported here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SELL and why does its data matter for French game sales?
SELL is the French video game publishers’ trade association that compiles and publishes weekly retail sales chart data for the French market, similar to how GSD data is used in the UK or NPD data is used in the US. SELL’s own annual report, the “Bilan du marchÃĐ français 2025,” draws directly on GSD panel data through the end of 2025 to benchmark the market’s yearly performance, underscoring that the weekly charts sit on top of the same underlying panel data used for SELL’s bigger-picture reporting. Outlets like VGChartz report SELL’s weekly rankings as the authoritative source for French retail chart positions.
Did Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy top the charts on every platform?
According to the reported data, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy topped both the overall French chart and the individual PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S platform charts for week 34, 2026. It did not top the Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, or PC charts, which were led by other titles including Elden Ring and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.
Is Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 a remaster or a remake?
It is a compilation release, following the same format as the original Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection released by Konami in 2023, which bundles legacy titles from the franchise together for current-generation platforms rather than rebuilding them from the ground up as full remakes.
How did Star Wars Zero Company perform outside of France?
VGChartz separately reported that Star Wars Zero Company debuted in first place on global Steam charts, indicating its commercial performance extended beyond French retail into digital storefronts worldwide.
What happened to Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Elden Ring this week?
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, which had held the number-one spot on the French charts the previous week, fell to fifth place. Elden Ring re-entered the top five in fourth place after having dropped out of the top five in an earlier week.
Where can I see the original weekly French chart data?
VGChartz publishes weekly French chart reports sourced from SELL data as part of its ongoing sales-chart coverage, alongside similar weekly reports for the UK, Japan, and other major territories.
Does a strong French retail debut predict global sales performance?
Not directly. French retail performance is one data point among many that publishers use to gauge early demand, but it does not necessarily translate proportionally to other territories, particularly for a French-developed title like Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, which may see outsized home-market demand relative to how it performs internationally.
