What this site covers

This site looks at 26 of the best-selling video games, from Super Mario Bros. in 1985 to Hogwarts Legacy in 2023. Each row has sales, series, platform, release year, developer, and publisher. The numbers come from the earlier class table, which used Wikipedia's list of best-selling video games.

The sales column is lifetime copies, in millions. When a game shipped on more than one platform, the figure adds those versions together. When several games report the same sales number, they share a rank, and the next rank skips ahead. The glossary defines every column, including the pack-in note for Wii Sports.

Three findings

Tetris (520 million), Minecraft (400 million), and Grand Theft Auto V (230 million) total 1,150 million copies. The other 23 games total 1,251.94 million. The mean for the whole table is 92.38 million copies. The median is 50.15 million. The gap between those two averages is the top of the list. The count is on the analysis page.

Eight rows name Nintendo as publisher, for 437.94 million copies combined. Wii Sports is the largest of those eight, and it shipped with the Wii console in most regions. That row counts console owners along with people who picked the game up on its own.

Terraria, Human: Fall Flat, and Stardew Valley were made by one person or a small studio. Together they sold 178 million copies. Each one sold more copies than Cyberpunk 2077. Grand Theft Auto V, at 230 million, sold more than those three games combined.

The top of the table

These five rows are the highest sales figures in the dataset. The full ranking is on the data table.

Where to go next

The data table has all 26 games, with links to each Wikipedia article and a gallery of the covers.

The analysis compares the top three games with the rest of the list, groups the rows by decade, sets small teams next to Rockstar and CD Projekt, and lists the Nintendo rows.

The glossary defines the columns and names the Wikipedia source.