Video games
What are the 10 best-selling videogames of all time?
We take a look at the list of the 10 best-selling video games of all time, a list led by Tetris and in which the unstoppable GTA V continues to grow.
Quality is not always in line with sales success, because if we take a look at the list of the best 100 games in history according to Metacritic, not all have exactly been a commercial success. In fact, times have changed and the sales of a game no longer mean that it will be a source of income for a company, since over time we have discovered new business models such as free to play, downloadable content, micropayments and many more.
Success has 10 names
What we can discover is the list of the 10 best-selling games in history, highlighting that obviously, when talking about sales, free games are not included, and titles like Fortnite or League of Legends don’t fit in the criteria for it. It should also be noted that games included in bundles with a console are included, thus we can find the tremendous success of Wii Sports.
A peculiar case is that of Tetris, since it would have 70 million copies sold in physical format - half of them with its version included in a bundle with the Game Boy -, but they would exceed 500 million if we added the downloads of the paid version on mobile phones. With this, Aleksei Pajitnov’s legendary game would rank as the best-selling game in history, although it’ll be a bit of a cheat, since there are different versions of the same game.
This is how the list of the 10 best-selling games in history would look like with data updated to December of last year 2022:
- Tetris (1984) - 520 million
- Minecraft (2009) - 238 million
- GTA V (2013) - 175 million
- Wii Sports (2006) - 82.9 million
- PUBG (2017) - 75 million
- Mario Kart 8/Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (2014) - 60.46 million
- Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) - 50 million
- Overwatch (2016) - 50 million
- Super Mario Bros. (1985) - 48 million
- Pokémon Generation 1 (1996) - 47 million