To no ones’ great surprise, blockbuster brands like Grand Theft Auto V, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Fifa 15 remain the best selling games of 2014.
In the UK, figures provided by Chart-Track show Fifa 15 as the biggest seller of the year. The long-running football sim series sold 2.66m copies in the UK in 2014, according to the Entertainment Retailers Association, with Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare coming in at 1.84m.
The top 10 includes more familiar brands like Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, but new titles Destiny and Watch Dogs also performed well:
1. Fifa 15 (EA)
2. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (Activision)
3. Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar)
4. Destiny, (Activision)
5. Watch Dogs, (Ubisoft)
6. Minecraft: Xbox Edition, (Microsoft)
7. Fifa 14 (EA)
8. Far Cry 4 (Ubisoft)
9. Call of Duty: Ghosts (Activision)
10. Assassin’s Creed: Unity (Ubisoft)
The complete top 100 shows that Ubisoft has the most games in the chart, followed by Electronic Arts. The modest performance of Nintendo’s Wii U shows in the fact that the machine’s highest placed games, the critically acclaimed Super Smash Bros and Mario Kart 8, appear at 28 and 30. There are interesting anomalies too, including EA’s four-year-old skateboarding sim, Skate 3, sneaking into the chart at 69. The game became hugely popular with YouTubers like PewDiePie due to its erratic physics, leading to an unexpected boost in sales.
Advertisement
Meanwhile, in the US, sports sims fared well with Fifa, Madden and NBA 2K15 all making it into the top 10. Here, though, it was Call of Duty that led the pack:
1. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (Activision)
2. Madden NFL 15 (EA)
3. Destiny (Activision)
4. Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar)
5. Minecraft (Microsoft)
6. Super Smash Bros. (Nintendo)
7. NBA 2K15 (2K)
8. Watch Dogs (Ubisoft)
9. FIFA 15 (EA)
10. Call Of Duty: Ghosts (Activision)
Both sets of figures are based on physical retail sales only, meaning that boxed copies are counted, but not digital downloads. In the US, figures provided by NPD show that boxed game sales are falling: in 2014 they dropped 14% to $5.47bn.
NPD found that hardware sales in the US in 2014 were up 20% on 2013 due to growing interest in the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 machines which brought reliefs.