That's the opposite of what I said... I said there is no tether to digital and physical sales.
Im not claiming you said that. This is your exact quote:
"And while these charts cover revenue, when the price of these games are similar, it's pretty analogous to units sold, especially in games that don't have heavy MTX"
But those charts are not analogous to digital units sold, because they feature lots of games which aren't even out yet and are affected by MTX as we both agreed.
We have three charts:
1. Physical unit charts from Famitsu / Media Create
2. Digital unit charts from PS blog
3. Digital revenue charts from PS Store
Generally, the numbers we get from chart 1 gives us a good idea of what to expect in chart 2 (for games with a physical version). If a game sells over 10k units a month physically, that's generally going to give it a good position on the digital unit charts too.
But there is a disconnect between those 2 charts and chart 3, due to MTX and pre-orders.
That was not the entire cause of the disconnect
Not entirely but those are the main two reasons. The vast majority of games that were above Kingdom Come in that chart either offered MTX or weren't out yet.
DQ3 fell on the PS Store charts rather quickly, despite still charting physically..
Which is my issue with the chart. The PS Store indicated that the digital ranking of DQIII fell rather quickly when in reality it didn't.
The PS Store weekly charts in December had DQIII ranked below titles like FIFA, DQX, Path of Exile 2, GTA V and Monster Hunter Wilds. In terms of digital unit sales, DQIII outsold all those games in December.
For games over 5,000 yen, DQIII was the 4th best selling PS5 game digitally in December. So it hardly fell at all.