Best-selling games of all time

Typically, a game’s sales are very predictable. There’s an initial spike for the first week or two, and then a massive drop-off as the next big game comes out. Some games might get a small second wind with some form of sale or bundle with DLC later on , but most games are lucky to even get that initial sales boost when competing with all the current games on the market. But then there are the anomalies. The games that are so massive, so popular, and so groundbreaking that they never seem to stop selling .

How many copies a game needs to be considered a success will change based on many factors, but it’s a fact that every developer wants to sell as many copies as possible. Granted, free games are a relatively new wrinkle that changes the way profits are looked at, but the same basic logic applies: more players equals more money. But with so many games constantly coming out, which ones have managed to outsell everything else? Is it the old classics that have had decades to accumulate sales, or somewhat new hits that took advantage of the larger gaming audience? Let’s check out the best-selling games of all time to see which ones make the cut.

1 Minecraft has sold over 350,000,000 units

Do not question the power of this blocky sandbox game

We all know Minecraft is big, but once you see just how big it is you will still be shocked. 350,000,000 sales is an unbelievable achievement for a game with simple graphics and no real story to speak of. But in reality, those two things are major ingredients in the game’s success. The fact that the game can run on any PC, console, or even phone makes it instantly accessible to everyone, and there not being a strict story means it can be played essentially forever. As if the sandbox nature of the game, where you can do and build nearly anything your imagination can conjure up, there are also dozens of official updates and thousands of community-made mods. There’s no doubt millions of people who purchased Minecraft two, three, and maybe even more times than that, plus schools that use it for educational purposes, but even then that number is still mindblowing.

2 Grand Theft Auto V has brought over 200,000,000 players to Los Santos

The potential sales of GTA 6 are astronomical if it can live up to expectations

Every time there’s a new GTA release since 3, it has been a record-breaking moment in the culture. I’m not just talking about games, either. Each major GTA release has smashed all possible records for the amount of money any media has made upon release, including films. Sure, games costing considerably more than a movie ticket helps, but not many movies can claim to have sold 200,000,000 tickets, either. This is even more impressive considering that, unlike Minecraft, GTA V is rated M so a lot of younger gamers wouldn’t easily be able to get it. However, since the game began on the PS3 and 360 and has been ported up to the PS4 and Xbox One, and then again to the current PS5 and Series X consoles, even gamers who were too young upon release would have plenty of time to come of age to buy and play it. Now we just have to see if GTA 6 can manage to dethrone its predecessor.

3 Wii Sports may have been a bundle, but it likely would’ve sold 82,9000,000 units anyway

Everyone from kids to grandparents loved Wii Sports

Normally, a pack-in game with a console wouldn’t crack even the top 10 list of that console’s best-selling games, but Wii Sports is different. You could almost say people were buying Wii Sports and it just so happened to come with a Wii instead of the other way around. The intuitive nature of the motion controls and understanding of how sports are meant to work made it a game anyone could play, old and young. It was such a phenomenon that most people who bought a Wii never bothered to buy another game and just kept playing Wii Sports. Sadly, future versions of the series could never quite hit as hard as the first one.

4 PUBG: Battlegrounds introduced over 75,000,000 players to battle royale games

The name change is weird, but the player count speaks for itself

Originally called Player Unknown’s Battle Grounds as an Arma 2 mod, it got so popular so fast for being the first massive battle royale game that it quickly launched as a stand-alone release. Granted, this wasn’t the first game in this genre, but it was the first to do it at such a huge scale and with an addictive gameplay loop. Fortnite would later come along and steal PUBG’s lunch a bit with its own more stable and polished version, but was also free so doesn’t qualify to make this list. Even so PUBG: Battlegrounds, as it was later renamed, is still a regular on Steam’s top 10 most played games and will likely stay there for a while yet.

5 Mario Kart 8 Deluxe can’t be stopped with 71,360,000 racers

While it languished on the Wii U, the Switch gave it a new lease on life

We all knew how great Mario Kart 8 was the day it came out, except so few of us were able to play it since it was on Nintendo’s worst-performing console, the Wii U. It could’ve been abandoned there and a sequel made for the Switch, but Nintendo knew it had a goldmine on its hands and wasn’t about to let us miss out. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe hit the Switch early in its life and has almost never dropped out of the top 20 best-selling games of the month since. And that was even before Nintendo bothered to add any DLC to it. Mario Kart 8 isn’t technically a pack-in game for the Switch, but you would be forgiven for thinking it was based on the sales.