The 20 best selling video games of all time
By Ryan Woodrow
Regardless of the artistic visionaries behind them, ultimately, video games are the world’s biggest form of media for one reason alone: they make money, loads and loads of money. With more people owning a console or PC than ever before, the earning potential in the industry is sky-high, with some truly ludicrous sales figures for the games that will top this list.
Of course, tracking sales isn’t always as straightforward as it seems. Take Skyrim for example, Todd Howard has made claims that the game has sold over 60 million copies, but Bethesda has never released any official data to back that up, with the most recent data we have showing just 40 million sales, so this list can only be based on official sales numbers released by the publishers.
What that caveat in mind, here are the 20 best-selling video games of all time.
Honorable mention – Tetris
Tetris is a very difficult one to quantify, because while, according to the Tetris company, the Tetris franchise has 520 million sales, no single iteration of the game has sold enough copies to crack the top 20 – the highest is the original Game Boy version with 35 million sales, if you were curious. However, Tetris is Tetris; the many different versions of it are still basically the same game, so it could be argued it deserves the top spot. We decided to put it in an honourable mention spot in the list as a compromise and leave it to you to make up your mind.
20 – Stardew Valley – 41 million copies sold
Kicking the list off properly, we have not a triple-A blockbuster, but one of the most indie games to ever indie.
Eric Barone, also known as ConcernedApe, made the game on their own after being dissatisfied with the state of the modern farming sim. He grew up a fan of the Harvest Moon games and wasn’t a fan of the modern Story of Seasons games, so set out to make a game that fixed all of what he saw as flaws with that series.
It turned out that a lot of people felt the same way, as once Stardew Valley became available to the public, people flocked to it, with it reaching 1 million copies within two months of its 2016 launch – an incredible achievement for an indie game like this. The game’s enthusiastic community and ConcernedApe’s dedication to continually updating the game helped it grow exponentially, to the point where it is one of the best-selling indie games of all time.
19 – Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 – 43 million copies sold
Given that Call of Duty is one of the most recognizable franchises to the non-gaming public, you might expect it to climb a little higher on this list, but this is CoD’s peak, and it’s easy to see why. While games like Modern Warfare 2 might still be hailed as the very best in the series, Black Ops 3 is where the franchise hype and overall quality met in a perfect peak, creating a title that is still beloved by fans of the military shooter.
18 – Wii Fit – 43.8 million copies sold
When it comes to mainstream appeal, it’s hard to find anything that has ever topped the Nintendo Wii. As we’ll see later in this list, being associated with that brand was like printing money at the console’s peak, with a strong gimmick that attracted customers in the millions. Wii Fit took that to the extreme, requiring the Wii Balance Board peripheral to play. It’s a testament to how strong the Wii was that even that was no hurdle to it becoming a must-buy for middle-aged parents the world over.
17 – Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 47.8 million copies sold
Sometimes everything conspires to make a game a success, and the scenario couldn’t have been more perfect for ACNH. For one thing, Animal Crossing fans were starving by this point in time. There hadn’t been a new mainline entry in the series for eight years by 2020, so when New Horizons was finally unveiled for the Nintendo Switch, it sent the hype into the stratosphere, cracking the mainstream gaming consciousness.
Then there are the real-life circumstances. The game launched in April 2020, when we were all locked in our homes thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, so a game about peacefully escaping to an idyllic island getaway with theoretically infinite content was the perfect thing to help get a lot of us through a very tough time.
16 – Bejeweled – 50 million copies sold
The classics are classic for a reason. Bejeweled is as simple as it gets; it is the archetypal match-3 game; you have gems of different colours and you have to line them up to get matches. While it’s a shame that the mobile market and Candy Crush would eventually come along and steal its thunder, Bejeweled still maintains its place in history with this huge sales figure.
15 – Overwatch – 50 million copies sold
If you’ve ever wondered why almost ten years after Overwatch’s launch, we’re still dealing with every company under the sun trying to make their own PvP hero shooter, this sales number is why. Overwatch took the popular gameplay formula established by Team Fortress 2 several years earlier and put in all the work to make its cast of colorful characters as unique and memorable as possible, and it worked. Its refinements to the gameplay formula and character design pulled people in like never before and set an annoying trend in the industry that we’re still dealing with.
14 – Human Fall Flat – 55 million copies sold
This is perhaps the biggest surprise on the list. Human Fall Flat is an indie title that got a lot of traction among YouTubers and streamers when it first launched in 2016. It was far from the first game to use the rage-baiting, frustrating platforming idea, but it arguably executes it the best, creating a hilarious and challenging game. Thanks to consistent content updates over the years and a surprising boom in the Chinese market, this game’s sales just kept ballooning until it got to where it is today.
13 – Super Mario Bros – 58 million copies sold
It would frankly be a crime if Mario didn’t appear on this list, and surprisingly, this isn’t even his most successful outing. Still, when it comes to video game iconography, it doesn’t get much more universally recognized than this, as this original 2D platformer showed the world what video games can do, something Mario has continued to do very well over his long career.
12 – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – 60 million copies sold
After Skyrim took the world by storm in 2011, the whole gaming community was poised and ready for the next major RPG that would push the feeling of immersion and adventure into a previously unforeseen level. It turned out that game was The Witcher 3. Launching in 2015, it still stands as a definitive must-play RPG with engaging combat, a beautiful world, and incredibly deep stories just about everywhere you look.
11 - Terraria – 64 million copies sold
Terraria was a brilliant game in the perfect place at the perfect time. Launching in 2011, it garnered loads of attention as a game in the same vein as Minecraft, but with a 2D perspective. That selling point alone was enough for it to immediately garner a lot of sales. It sold 400k copies in its first month – a huge amount for an indie title in 2011 – and as the years rolled on it just kept getting bigger and better.
As the survival crafting genre grew and grew, Terraria rode that wave, developing in a different direction than most by heavily incorporating RPG elements, making it a lot more of a freeform adventure than a straight-forward sandbox game. To this day, there is still nothing quite like it.
10 – The Oregon Trail – 65 million copies sold
Back in the 1970s there were many ways that companies were trying to get video games to catch on, and one of the routes some places took was through education. While that would eventually fizzle out, it didn’t come before one huge hit got through the gates. The Oregon Trail was originally made by a pair of students on their school computers as a text-only game, which was eventually deleted from the school’s systems at the end of the academic year.
Thankfully, the developers formed a studio and remade the game, with the 1985 version being the one most people will recognise. It was ported to all of the major consoles/microcomputers available at the time and was still selling gangbusters as late as the mid-’90s, and even today enjoys an enduring nostalgia.
9 – The Sims – 70 million copies sold
Despite what edgy Reddit posts may say about playing The Sims making you a “fake gamer,” it continues to be one of the most enduring and endearing franchises out there. The wacky world of this life-sim-meets-swimming-pool-murder-sim lets you go on all sorts of adventures that are compelling whether you’re living a mundane life or getting up to big sitcom-style hijinks. The original game is definitely the most grounded of the bunch, but it still stands as one of gaming’s most iconic titles.
8 – Red Dead Redemption 2 – 74 million copies sold
Regardless of what you think of their games as a whole, it’s undeniable that Rockstar creates some of the most beautiful and immersive worlds in all of gaming, and that factor is what drew so many into RDR 2. The wild west fantasy is one of the most enduring in our modern media landscape, and RDR 2 is the definitive way to experience that fantasy. While its intense focus on realism may sometimes be at a detriment to the gameplay, it gives this world the perfect vibe to keep you hanging around. Combine that with classic Rockstar writing and action and you have a blast of a game that you’ll never forget.
7 – PUBG: Battlegrounds – 75 million copies sold
Free-to–play games are disqualified from this list – which is why you won’t see Fortnite on here, and while PUBG did go free-to-play in 2021, it was a paid game for several years before that, in which time it sold enough copies to make this list. Unless you were there, it’s hard to comprehend just how quickly the battle royale genre took over in the 2017/18 boom. It felt like PUBG was just starting to gain traction, and then suddenly it was all anyone was playing everywhere you looked. A formula that had existed in corners of the internet for years finally hit the mainstream and it led to one of the biggest genre booms we’ve ever seen.
6 – Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow – 76.1 million copies sold
Pokémon is the biggest media franchise in the entire world today, and this is where it started. In what was quite frankly a technological marvel, Game Freak managed to fit 151 unique collectible creatures into a full, engaging RPG adventure on a cartridge just 373KB big – remember that when you’re downloading GTA 6’s 300GBs. Whether you found your love for the franchise through these games or via the anime, these all-time-great games launched an unstoppable juggernaut of a media franchise single-handedly.
5 – Mario Kart 8 – 76.6 million copies sold
That’s right, the most successful Mario game isn’t even a platformer. Mario Kart 8 is a lot of people’s favorite game in the series, and it’s easy to see why. Even with Mario Kart World now out, many people still gravitate to its tight racing mechanics and fantastic track design.
What also helps MK8 in the sales department is how long it stood as the main Mario Kart game, releasing during the Wii U’s lifecycle, getting a new lease of life with the release of the Nintendo Switch and eventually a second round of DLC to cap it off. It had 11 years as one of the most prominent and accessible titles for Nintendo’s main consoles, which does it a lot of favours.
4 – Ark: Survival Evolved – 79 million copies sold
This one may be a surprise to see so high, but then consider the premise: a survival crafting game where you can tame and ride dinosaurs, then do battle with them. When you think of it that way, it’s actually very easy to understand why our monkey brains flocked to it in the millions. It sold over 5 million copies before even leaving early access and after it hit official launch with DLC and content updates galore in the years since, it’s just kept pulling players back for more.
3 – Wii Sports – 82.9 million copies sold
As we spoke about earlier in the list, the Wii penetrated the mainstream market like never before. Its motion control gimmick may have ruined several generations of gaming after it, but it brought Nintendo’s family ideals to the forefront with games that everyone could easily understand and play together, with Wii Sports being the flag-bearer for these concepts. It sold so well in part thanks to being a pack-in title with the Wii itself, making it basically a mandatory game to own for anyone interested in a Wii. It let you get everyone in the family playing with simple and fun games that only occasionally lead to a smashed TV – wear your wrist-straps, people.
2 – Grand Theft Auto 5 – 215 million copies sold
There’s a reason GTA 6 has taken so long it’s because GTA 5 is still printing Rockstar a ludicrous amount of money that it would never have to make another video game again if it didn’t feel like it.
Thanks to the Streisand effect, media outrage had already turned GTA into the most popular mainstream gaming franchise out there. With GTA 4 already being a smash hit, when the first trailers for GTA 5 dropped, a perfect hype storm was created, and all of the Rockstar executives prepared their bank accounts for an unbelievable wave of sales.
Sure enough, the game was everything it was cracked up to be – both in terms of gameplay and sales numbers – making one billion dollars in just three days, making it the fastest-selling media product in history. Then, a few months late,r came the launch of GTA Online, which has been a money factory for Rockstar ever since and continues to drive sales.
All that said, we expect to be updating this list to talk about how GTA 6 smashed all of these records sometime soon.
1 – Minecraft – 350 million copies sold
While it’s true that, when it comes to Minecraft, you either get it or you don’t, if you don’t, you’re definitely in the minority, looking at this unbelievable sales figure. What started life as one man’s Lego simulator quickly spiralled out of control into the most unexpected hit of all time.
Minecraft’s complete creative freedom appeals to simply everyone, and there are so many different ways to find joy in it. The blocky world makes it easy to understand, and its relatively peaceful, non-violent nature means that no parent could reasonably object to their child playing it. Reams of words have been and will continue to be written on exactly what makes Minecraft so unstoppably popular, and we don’t see these sales slowing down any time soon.
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