has sold over 43,000,000 copies since it was released, which is a lot of coins. There’s a reason any game that lets you create and share levels will have multiple versions of Super Mario World 1-1 uploaded to its servers on the first day: because a huge percentage of the gaming audience knows it like the backs of their hands. The NES pack-in is the definitive videogame for a generation, and the first experience many ever had with the medium. This is what the Wii could do for a game: if you slap some goofy gimmick in the box (in this case, a plastic wheel that you could snap the Wii Remote into), add the word “Wii” to the title, and release it at the height of the Wii fad, you could expect to sell tens of millions of copies. It is not the most popular or best reviewed Mario Kart game of all time. Mario Kart Wii is the best-selling Mario Kart game of all time. Wii Sports Resort cruised to over 33,000,000 units moved on the back of four facts: it was the sequel to the mega blockbuster Wii Sports it came bundled with the WiiMotionPlus peripheral, which improved the system’s motion controls it was later bundled with the console alongside Wii Sports and it was legitimately a lot of fun to play. If a Nintendo game had the word “Wii” in the title, it usually sold like gangbusters. Over 30,000,000 copies sold is no joke, so clearly Nintendo knew what they were doing. Nostalgia is hard to fight, though, and even though this game was new in 2009, it was heavily steeped in the 2D nature of Mario’s past. Not that the retrotastic side-scrolling Mario game is on the list, but that the vastly superior Super Mario Galaxy, which was released for the Wii one year earlier, isn’t. We’re not going to lie: this bums us out just a little bit.
This massive, intricately detailed RPG is one of the best-reviewed games of the decade. Mark it up to both the game’s ubiquity-it’s available on almost every game console released over the last 15 years, as well as PC-and its quality. If you stripped Nintendo games from this list, Skyrim would be the fifth best-selling game of all time. The Dragonborn roared its way to the best sales numbers of the Elder Scrolls franchise. Paste can’t personally vouch or fact-check these numbers-the games industry generally tries to hide its sales data-but Wikipedia has links that back up its numbers, if you want to research it for yourself.
That doesn’t mean they’re the most profitable, but that they simply moved the most units off of store shelves and through digital storefronts.
These are the 20 best-selling videogames of all time, according to this Wikipedia list. Those are the games we’re talking about here, the games that most dramatically separated players from their money. And then there are the games that are true blockbusters in the Hollywood sense of the word, selling tens of millions of copies and reaping millions-and sometimes billions-of dollars. Some games lose money, some break even, and some make a tidy little profit. They’re made to make money for the corporations that release them and the developers who create them, and as with any commercial enterprise, success is not always guaranteed.