Best-Selling Video Game Franchises of All Time

Data

💡 Note: What Are Video Game Franchise Sales?

When people talk about a "best-selling video game franchise," they mean the total number of copies of every game released under a single series brand, counted across all its iterations, re-releases, remasters, and spin-offs. The figures on this chart are lifetime global sales in millions of units, how many physical copies and paid digital downloads a franchise has moved since its very first title launched.

These sales totals are cumulative and still climbing. They are not a snapshot of a single year, but the running scoreboard of an entire brand's commercial history. That is why decades-old franchises like Mario and Tetris sit at the very top: they have simply had more time, more games, and more generations of players to accumulate huge numbers.

A few things worth knowing about how these numbers work:

• Free-to-play and mobile are counted differently. Franchises that are primarily free-to-play (like many battle royale or live-service titles) are measured by downloads or players rather than unit sales, which is why they do not appear on a "copies sold" ranking despite massive audiences.
• Bundles and re-releases count. When a console bundles a game, or a classic gets remastered and sold again, those units add to the franchise total.
• Different publishers count differently. Some report only shipped units, others only sell-through to consumers, and a few consolidate the number. The figures are typically what each publisher itself discloses.
• Sales are not the same as revenue. Unit sales tell you how many copies moved; revenue also depends on price, the share of digital sales, microtransactions, and DLC.
• A franchise is different from a single game. The chart ranks series brands. A single blockbuster release is almost never bigger than a sprawling multi-game brand.

Some standout facts from the data:

• Nintendo's Mario franchise has sold over 907 million copies since the arcade title "Donkey Kong" in 1983, comfortably the largest in history.
• Tetris and Pokémon each sit around the half-billion mark, with Tetris spanning every device ever invented and Pokémon selling across mainline RPGs, spin-offs, and remakes since 1996.
• Call of Duty reached 500 million through an annualised release cycle, a new paid game every year since 2003, plus it is a top money-maker from digital add-ons.
• Minecraft climbs fast partly because it is the youngest major franchise here (debut 2011) yet already past 425 million, helped by selling on virtually every platform.
• Red Dead rounds out the top 20 at 116 million with barely two main titles, proof that quality and cultural impact can rival raw output.
• Sports franchises dominate the mid-table for a simple reason: FIFA, Madden NFL, NBA 2K, and Need for Speed re-release nearly every year, so their totals compound quickly.

Why does this matter? Franchise sales are one of the clearest measurements of a game brand's staying power and cultural reach. A franchise that keeps selling after 10, 20, or 40 years has built lasting goodwill, an engaged fanbase, and a dependable revenue engine for its publisher. They also explain why companies prize "IP": a cherished franchise like Mario, Zelda, or GTA is often more valuable than any single product, because it can generate films, merchandise, theme-park attractions, and mobile spin-offs long after its debut.

One more fun thought: half of the top 20 franchises were created by just a few companies based in Japan: Nintendo, Capcom, Square Enix, Sega, and Konami. The other half are Western. That split, more than anything, reflects how the industry's creative and commercial centre of gravity has shifted over the past four decades as gaming grew from a niche hobby into the world's biggest entertainment medium.