The many games of The Most Successful

With Rockstar and Grant Theft Auto 6 in the news for some unsavory reasons, I saw quite a lot of hubbubs about the success of the fifth game in the franchise and its comparative success compared to other games, and other forms entertainment. I’m slightly flabbergasted that someone would claim that GTA5 was the most successful form of entertainment, when people without much contact with the modern world knew about Michael Jackson. Thriller permeated everywhere, you can’t beat it.

Nevertheless, this made an interesting thought experiment on what counts as The Most Successful Video Game. It didn’t help that I saw the goal being pushed after one or two rounds of discussion, under which at least few realized that there’s more than one way of seeing this. Business has a different view on things compared to the customers, and then you have the historical view that has a longer view on how games have affected culture in general. This is why Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout and Pac-Man still live on in the cultural memory, even if the amount of success they’ve seen in terms of money is less than whatever big Triple A title that’s come after.

I should probably note that there’s also a slight difference in how some use the term franchise. While I tend to use it wrong as a synonym with Intellectual Property, an example of a franchise would be Street Fighter II. Street Fighter III would be its own franchise, while all falling under the same umbrella of IP. This is because of merchandising rights and all that business jazz.

Units Sold is of course a big one, the cumulative sales made by one game, or a series of games. For example, the Mario games have a cumulative sale of 957 million units, while Mega Man has 43 million units.

As for individual titles, Minecraft is an evergreen title that hits 350 units sold. GTAV follows It at 220 million units.

Units sold doesn’t really keep you afloat a lot, unless you have Revenue. This is the total gross the series does through game sales, possible DLC, merch, and other licensed material. Pokémon tops this chart with $115, followed by Call of Duty with $31 million.

The way digital games are consumed is different from purchased titles, of course. That’s why something like Candy Crush or Dungeon Fighter Online can top the chart of games with most revenue, as individuals put more money into these games. This compares apples and oranges; the business models are ultimately very different and the amount of money you can squeeze out of a customer via single sold title plus DLC is ultimately less than digital-only but squeezing small amounts throughout their play time. Gacha mixes things with the whole gambling aspect.

I don’t think we should count individual downloads. This is because a download doesn’t translate to a purchase, or revenue. There are numerous cases of curious people testing a free game out and then proceeding not to continue. These people are often counted to the player metric nonetheless, which shows that the total number of players can be skewed to showcase a more positive statistic for PR reasons. This is the same reason why Sony cites the total number of PlayStation 2’s when asked about the total number of consoles sold. It just looks better, and they can fudge the numbers for their benefit.

Then again, Subway Surfers has 2.05 billion individual downloads and spawned numerous imitators so there’s something value in that too.

Player Count is also something that seems to be a significant metric, with Roblox topping the list with the estimated number of players being in billions cumulative. Minecraft hitting a nice spot of 600 million plus players shows that it really is the Tetris of the modern age.

I would argue that the peak number of players, and how long that plateau is held, is a more significant counter simply because it shows how many players consume the game in each span of time. Through this, we get an idea whether a game holds its audience, which is far more important in the long-term in terms of customer satisfaction and how well customers make emotional connection to the game. A game that gets massive sales at the start but sees the player count sink like a rock in water has no lasting hold on the market.

While I don’t give much weight on the Critical Acclaim the journalists give to games (as they are nothing more than just an extra arm in the PR machine), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Soul Calibur top the chart with 99 and 98 according to Metacritic. I’d like to say the User Score is the metric we should use, but seeing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 topping the current list reminds me how customers can’t be any more objective than the journalists most of the time.

If we count Spacewar! as the progenitor of all modern video and computer games (and we are,) gaming is 63 at the time of writing. There are only a handful of game names from the early era of electronic gaming that are still strongly alive. Pac-Man and Mario are the handful, with the rest of their brethren being relocated to nostalgic revivals and retro collections. While we may think the most popular games we have now will last for all time, we’ve seen so many game names simply vanishing, dying out or otherwise fall into torpor. Mega Man is a great example of this, sometimes popping its head up only to fall back into Capcom archives. Maybe we’ll get another game by 2030. Prince of Persia seemed like a name that would never die, but overexposure and simply being owned by Ubisoft clearly took its toll on the name. Same thing could be happening to Assassin Creed now, one can only hope.

Some of you might’ve noticed that I counted Donkey Kong as a Mario title. So does Nintendo, as that’s the first appearance of Mario, then named Jumpman. If you want, we can count Mario being started in 1983, making Mario 42 to Pac-Man’s 45. These are still small numbers compared to something like Universal Monsters, which have lasted for good 117 years. Looking at the comic book world, both Superman and Batman are in their 80s.

However, the gaming industry influences itself. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was influenced by Final Fantasy, which was seen as the premier gaming IP at one point in the Western World. However, going back and seeing what influenced Final Fantasy we find Dragon Quest and its numerous copycats and imitators. Going further back we find both Utima and Wizardry influencing the game, which also influenced so many other Japanese computer RPGs like The Black Onyx, which inspired the creation of The Legend of Zelda. Ultima and Wizardry have their roots in MUDs, which have roots in table-top RPGs, mainly Dungeon and Dragons, which have their roots in the military games generals and other army leaders would play to train their leadership.

The roots of video and computer gaming lie in the games and play of children and adults alike, alongside how stories were told by acting and playing them out. This tangent is to remind ourselves that gaming is not something that just came along with computers and consoles but is just the latest iteration of mankind has been doing ever since we dwelled in caves.

Nevertheless, the game with most cultural impact is probably Pokémon. Its Trading Card Game sales generate about one to three billion dollars per year, which rivals the top-most successful film’s revenue in their lifetime. Of course, TCG is an evergreen product compared to film’s finite runs, so this should illustrate how different the media are. Still, the franchise IP generated that $150 billion plus dollars and probably is Japan’s single most important import product. Pikachu is the face and mascot of the franchise, well-known across the glob, and served as an ambassador to 2014 World Cup, 2020 Tokyo Olympics and in 2025 World Expo. Its yellow face is featured in over fifty embassies across the world. Surprisingly, Pokémon has shown itself to be a multi-generational product, a cornerstone of sorts that sees constant parodies in other shows and games while drawing tourists of all ages to Pokémon Centers across the world, especially to Japan.

Even if Pokémon is a 1990s product, it can be placed alongside Mario and Pac-Man as a long-lasting face of gaming, with it probably ending up as the face of gaming on the long run if we had to choose one, for better or worse. This also illustrates some why Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, and to a lesser extent GameFreak would be freakishly overprotective of their IP. There are numerous other contenders we could put there, but I’m making a point there; there must be generationally recognizable face for all without really any breaks.

The list of games that influenced other games is as wide as the library of games out there. Talking about First-Person Shooting ends up someone tracing back to Halo, then Half-Life, a mention of Quake’s code still running in some modern games, another mentioning Goldeneye 007, with usually ending with either Doom or Wolfenstein 3D in a similar fashion I did with RPGs above.

While we have been seeing the influence of video and computer games on the culture ever since the 1970s in an increasing fashion, it’s hard to determine how well a game or a name will endure as history happens. Only in hindsight can we properly determine the ebbs and flows of masses, something the current gaming industry seems to ignore in favour of trying to appease each other with the press as their echo chamber. When Demon’s Souls was put out for the first time, nobody expected it to become a cultural cornerstone. However, history has shown us that people like to play challenging games, and from that challenge comes customer satisfaction. Well-built world and framing, with play-first mentality, is a sort of silver bullet. It’s not a game for everyone, and that’s fine. You can’t please everyone with one product, and trying to is simply being dishonest toward the game and the customer.

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