UK Charts: Ghost Recon: Wildlands returns to No.1

Last week's No.1 has absolutely vanished from the UK charts.

As a game aimed at a dedicated core audience, Persona 5 was always going to suffer a steep drop-off in its second week. However, the real reason for Persona's disappearance from the Top 40 is more to do with the absence of stock at UK retail.

The new GfK Top Four - Ghost Recon, LEGO Worlds, GTA V and Overwatch - all grew in sales week-on-week, boosted by Easter sales activity. Ghost Recon tops the charts once again. The title hasn't been a big hit with critics (at least not by Ubisoft's usual standards), but that hasn't deterred the fans. The game has yet to leave the Top Two positions and is comfortably the best-selling game of the year so far.

There were just two new releases in the Top 40 this week, and both hail from the worlds of indie development.

Yooka-Laylee debuted at No.6, which was a little below what may have been expected of the 3D platform revival. The title seemed to go down with fans of its spiritual predecessor Banjo-Kazooie, but failed to impress others - its review scores ranged from 2/10 to 10/10.

It may well have charted higher, however. Developer Playtonic, publisher Team17 and distributor Sold Out had directly supplied some of the game's Kickstarter backers (the ones that paid the extra £20) their boxed copies, which will not have been counted here. The title only missed out on the Top Five by 600 units.

The other indie game released this week was Stardew Valley at No.30, which was distributed in a box by 505 Games. The game was released digitally back in February last year, so digital had a significant head start over the physical version. However, it's not worth drawing too much from the title's first week. It's the sort of product that could well perform better over a prolonged period of time, akin to 505's other indie hits Terraria and Rocket League.

An interesting observation made to me this week is that Zelda has pretty much sold exactly the same number of units every single week after its initial launch window - which will give us an idea of how many new Switch units are being released in the channel every week.