Top 10 in Sales - First Person Shooters - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 23 April 2012 / 57,327 Views
Welcome to the new ‘Top 10’ weekly feature. Each week we will be taking a look at the top 10 selling games in a particular genre, platform, most recent month, even sprinkling in the top 10 selling games from a past year. All sales specified will be worldwide, unless stated otherwise. If there is a particular top 10 you want to see leave a comment and it may be featured in a future top 10.
For the first week we will be taking a look at the top 10 bestselling first person shooters. All of the platforms for a specific game have been combined.
Looking at the top 10 bestselling first person shooters the first things that sticks out is that the Call of Duty franchise has dominated since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare released and that each successor, excluding World at War has increased in sales. The five best selling are on the Call of Duty franchise, while Modern Warfare just passed Black Ops as the bestselling Call of Duty game to date. These five Call of Duty games have sold a combined 111.96 million units.
The one other thing that sticks out is that there are three exclusives in the top 10, all part of the Halo franchise. It is the biggest exclusive franchise on a Microsoft platform. Halo 3 (X360) is the only game in the franchise to reach the ten million mark, while it is looking unlikely Halo: Reach will reach that mark, with Halo 4 (X360) set to release on November 6, 2012.
The other two games which is not part of the Call of Duty franchise or Halo franchise are Battlefield 3 and Medal of Honor: Frontline. Battlefield 3 which was set to compete with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has sold 12.88 million copies in six months or just a little under half of what Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has sold to date. Medal of Honor: Frontline along with Halo 2 (XB) are the only two games to be for the previous generation.
Taking a look at the top 10 first person shooters as a column graph really shows that the sales are increasing gradually from Halo 2 (XB) are up to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The five games to sell more than 15 million units are for the Call of Duty franchise, while the two bestselling first person shooters from last generation are now the number nine and 10 bestselling.
All of the top 10 bestselling first person shooters are on a Microsoft platform, seven are on a Sony platform, five are for a Nintendo platform, and seven are for the PC (this includes Halo 2 which VGChartz does not have North American sales numbers for).
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Too bad this site doesn't track PC sales because Half-Life has sold over 10 million copies and Half-Life 2 over 12 million.
How on Earth could I manage to forget Counter-Strike? Last time I checked the original CS sold 15 million and that was years ago.
yes video game charts using pc sales like you see if you look at the cod and battlefield sales. so if there shouldn't be pc sales like you think, they would have to take them out of cod and battlefield in the chart as well. but they didn't which means they have to count all pc games.
holyyyyyyy.thats a graet success for activision.
Halo: Reach has definitely passed the 10 million mark. It was bundled digitally over xmas with Fable III and that sold 1.5 million due to the bundled, so including those digital sales and considering it's been available to purchase digitally for a while now, Halo: Reach has sold at least 10.5 million to date and will go on to pass 11 million.
wow, MW3 even beat Black Ops now too, so guess the consoles units sold more and more, i think Black Ops 2 will sell even more than MW3?
Call of Duty wasn't that popular last gen, but since this gen, it become the most popular series lol.
Look at these Call of Duty sales they're increasing !! wonder how much next epsiodes could reach !
As others said: PC sales, and not a fan of this combined multiplatform sales. I think Halo sales are impressive for a single platform. Imagine multiple.
bouzane@ you got it wrong
half life 2 sold 12mil along with the help of of orange box sales(pc,ps3,xbox 360) half life 2 and on original xbox
so if you take half life 2 out of orange box and xbox release it would probably be around 4-5mil
half life indeed sold 10 mil but half life 2 standalone not even close
ps: halo 3 sold 14.5 mil
The number I provided is actually old data from February of last year. At that point the combined sales for all versions of the Orange Box and the Xbox version of Half-Life 2 totaled less than 4 million units. That being said, why not count those sales? I transferred the copy of Half-Life 2 I received as part of the Orange Box to a friend over Steam. Anyway, what's your source for Halo 3 having 3 million digital sales?
I just discovered a Game Informer article from November 2008 that states Half-Life 2 had sold 6.5 million copies through retail. It was pretty explicit that this figure only included the stand alone copies of Half-Life 2 sold through retail. The Orange Box is listed separately at 3 million and the figures provided do not include digital sales. For comparison' sake Counter-Strike + Source + Condition Zero was listed at a total of 9.2 million and we know that the series has surpassed 27 million sales as of August 2011 according to CBS. Don't kid yourself, Valve does big business.
bouzane@ you got it wrong
half life 2 sold 12mil along with the help of of orange box sales(pc,ps3,xbox 360) half life 2 and on original xbox
so if you take half life 2 out of orange box and xbox release it would probably be around 4-5mil
half life indeed sold 10 mil but half life 2 standalone not even close
ps: halo 3 sold 14.5 mil
Too bad this site doesn't track PC sales, count digital downloads, or bundles that offer a code instead of a disc even though it would have been really easy. Given that you can have downloaded Reach forever now thru Xbox marketplace, charts like these barely matter because the companies know they're getting the sales, and they know their bottom line. Technology is advancing, steam sales have more than doubled in the same time physical copies have fallen and this site refuses to get with the times.
This is pretty obvious when you do it this way. This generation was just way too successful. You should take console sales into this calculation. Like, 80% of N64 owners bought Perfect Dark or something similar (of course, this figure is made up). That way we could probably get different results and they'd tell us more about the greatness.
21.1% of 360 / 18.3% of PS3 owners bought Modern Warfare 3
20.2% of 360 / 17.8% of PS3 owners bought Black Ops
19.4% of 360 / 15.5% of PS3 owners bought Modern Warfare 2
13.1% of 360 / 9.6% of PS3 owners bought Modern Warfare
10.2% of 360 / 7.6% of PS3 owners bought World at War
7.7% of N64 owners bought Perfect Dark
Looks like Call of Duty really affected Halo sales.....will Halo 4 even be able to top Reach?
