3. Wii Sports. Launched 2006. 82.78 million copies sold.
From the get-go, Wii Sports is bundled with the Wii in most markets as a showcase of the motion-sensing capabilities of the console. Activities in the game included simulations of baseball, bowling, boxing, golf, and tennis, all done through the Wii remote. But even if most of the sales numbers come from the bundling with the Wii device, the game had good sales even in areas where there’s no bundling, such as in Japan, where the game set the record for two-day-debut sales. The Wii’s success (and by extension, the Wii Sports’) has been so instructive that ten years after launch, which is like 100 years in the technology world, the Wii gameplay is being incorporated into the technology for the next-generation Nintendo Switch hybrid console. Whether that upcoming console contains a built-in game that will rival the success of Wii Sports remains to be seen.
2. Minecraft. Launched 2011. 107.86 million copies sold.
Minecraft ranks second in our list of the best selling video games of all time. For all the sophistication involved in the gaming scene today, the two best-selling video games of all time involve good old blocks. One of them is Minecraft, a sandbox video game set in a three-dimensional world where players can create just about anything out of cubes. From there, gameplay expands wildly, from traditional modes such as survival, hardcore, creative, adventure, and spectator, to various modifications as many as the number of members in a thriving gaming community dedicated to creating game variants. This flexible gameplay contributed to the exponential growth of the game, the only one so far in this millennium that sold more than 100 million copies. Such monumental success led Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) to purchase the game, its publisher, and all related intellectual property, for $2.5 billion. Minecraft has since contributed as much as $63 million in sales per quarter for Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), which then used the game as a come-on for its other gaming properties, such as the Xbox One S.
