I’m sad Howard’s legacy sold so well.
Also Cyberpunk sold better than I expected given the launch.
i’m wondering if the boycott had adverse effects and promoted the game in more gamer-centric spaces that otherwise wouldn’t have cared that much
obviously it’s a harry potter game, it was always gonna sell well. but 2nd best selling game of the last 5 years??? ouch
CDPR spent the time fixing CP2077 and then released a killer DLC, putting the entire game on sale a ton along the way. They also listened and reconfigured entirely some of the clunky parts of gameplay/RPG elements.
To be fair, Hogwarts Legacy is a very good game, I started playing yesterday and the atmosphere of the movies is perfectly captured! I did expect a cash grab, but I was totally wrong.
As someone who has beaten the game. The cash grab part is just after your first day and the “open world” starts up.
It’s not a bad game, but it gets pretty bland and generic once the main loop of ditching school starts.
For now there’s nothing of the sort, but I’m only a few hours in. Could it be too good to be true…?
Well, let’s see. It is a AAA game after all…
Edit: No, the game really is fun. 20 hours in, and I must say even if it were only exploring Hogwarts it would be quite worth my time. The music and atmosphere are really neat.
Edit2: I can’t believe it’s a AAA title. There is no ingame shop, everything is obtainable just by playing. The world is beautiful and full of interesting stuff to find. And best of all: it’s fun! The cash grab part is just a lie. If you have an agenda, use arguments, not lies.
Well, I know at least one part of this is pretty out of date. Baldur’s Gate 3 just got confirmed a few weeks ago as having sold over 20M copies. We have so many round numbers here because companies generally only share milestones.
Not just out of date, complete and utter fabrication.
TIL people eat shit from the “visual capitalist” and swallow it whole. I’d bet my right nut this image took 15min of AI “prompt engineering” and 30 of photoshop copy-paste. None of if is remotely reliable.
Its source is a wiki, noted in the bottom right corner. I’ve seen plenty of these numbers reported publicly before. By its very nature, it’s going to lag behind real time.
Funny you should say that, because I checked the source and they haven’t compiled the 2025 list. You know what would definitely halucinate one…
I see different figures for the list. The one in the infographic does not exist.
There were three edits in the past few days. Feel free to look at the diff, but I’m not making a Fandom account to do so. It would stand to reason that it was this list, and those three edits probably account for Palworld’s number being lower in the graphic and why the wiki has two more games on it, if they pulled the data more than a few days ago.
If only there was a pervasive tool nowadays that is famously inaccurate, likes to hallucinate and frequently cites deprecated data… Something artificial that
slopcontent mill producing shitrags like the visual capitalist like to use… I can’t quite put my finger on it…edit: Fyi, that’s why any writer worth its salt puts dates on their citations and usually citations include urls. Just another piece of the puzzle that when put together screams “visual capitalist is a shitrag low effort content mill and people should not propagate their message”.
Where are you getting the term “visual capitalist”? And why did you learn about this phenomenon today? Misinformation has been rampant for over a decade now.
It’s awful seeing a game based on a bigots work being bestselling.
It just feels like a reminder that so many people don’t care about trans people at all because of “nostalgia” and not caring that Rowling benefits and hurts us.
sighs I’m sorry for that rant just sad/disappointed/angry to see this.
Harry Potter was such a crucial part of my childhood and teen years. I cried when Dumbledore died. I read several of the books over a dozen times, and did an annual reread of the whole series for awhile.
I’m not trans but that TERF cunt will never see another cent or good word from me. I spit on her name as she spit on my childhood. Solidarity, friend.
From a trans girl: thank you. <3
You will be surprised to know that you don’t agree on much of anything with most people.
Why tf do we need to investigate every damn niche of a creator’s mind before deciding to buy?
Idgaf he’s a bigot, a cow or a racist. If I like x thing that was made, and them being a bigot, cow or racist does not impact the product I’m buying, then I’m buying it.
Every day we use products that were made under the control of CEO’s that would shit on us rather than shake our hands, that have ruined so many lives you can’t count them because it’s probably “illegal” since they sleep with everyone in power, but somehow we draw the line at bigotry.
If you don’t like supporting bad people you better move in a forest and start raising some chickens because almost everything we buy supports some form of moronity that we can’t even comprehend. That one product you don’t buy won’t make a sliver of difference.
You not buying it is whatever, but expecting others not to is really pretentious.
Idgaf he’s a bigot, a cow or a racist. If I like x thing that was made, and them being a bigot, cow or racist does not impact the product I’m buying, then I’m buying it.
Congrats on perfectly respresenting the core of what is wrong with modern society.
“If it doesn’t get in the way of my mindless consumerism, I’ll happily support people who are openly racist”
People like you, more so even than the bigots themselves, are why society is turning to shit.
Also congratulations on completely missing my point
No I understood the point of your comment perfectly, it’s the old “well we can’t complete fix every problem with society magically overnight with 1 action, so we shouldn’t try to do anything” argument. With perhaps a dash of “you want to improve society, yet you participate in society, curious” thrown in as well.
Basically if everyone were to have the same attitude as you literally nothing would ever get better.
Well thank god you’re not buying anything from thisi artist. You singlehandedly fed like 1000 children who now don’t get free lunches at school in america.
The problem with Rowling is she has a massive influence over the space.
It’s not like some random black metal artist who lives in a cabin that no one’s heard of. She’s quite literally a billionaire from this franchise and spends a ton of that wealth lobbying against Trans people.
Quite literally the profits from Harry Potter are going towards hate.
I guess you don’t care about a lot of the other categories either.
- Rank 1, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16 are developed/published by a patent troll that stifles the whole games industry with frivolous patent suits and milks their audience dry while investing hardly anything into their games.
- Rank 5 and 6 are published by a corporation widely known for their leadership being extremely misogynistic and exploitative.
- Rank 17 is published by a corporation that’s known for being extremely exploitative.
Btw, most of the corporations on the list donated to Trump, spy at their customers, use anti-competitive tactics, overwork and exploit their developers, employ psychologists to squeeze as much money out of vulnerable customers (e.g. those with psychological issues) and so on and so on.
And you apparently don’t care about any of that. The only thing you care about is that a game that actually includes a trans character is based upon a 20-30yo book series that contains no anti-trans content, but was written by an author who later went on to post some anti-trans garbage years after the series was done and dusted.
Tbh, that’s concerning, that you prefer games that directly benefit a transphobe regime over games that are remotely related to a transphobe influencer.
I haven’t played 99% of the games listed here. Pokémon Shining Pearl has been the only one I played.
I don’t support any of the other companies either and I’m well aware they donate to fascists.
The reason I brought up the HP game is because the author directly has been doing a lot of harm to trans people. This doesn’t condone what these other companies are doing but I find that many people tend to look the other way with the HP franchise as a whole.
People look the other way with literally everything.
They happily shop at Amazon, even though they are the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
They play Minecraft even though it’s been developed by a white supremacist.
They use Windows even though Microsoft is complicit in a list of all sorts of horrible things too long to list here.
They use Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta VR even though this corporation has done more for the errosion of democracy than any other entity so far.
They buy Nestle, even though it’s going so far as to cut off local populations from their water supplies.
The list continues on and on. Name a single corporation where people en large have done a real, long-term boycott for moral reasons. The only thing I can think of that kinda happened was when Tesla sales fell a little bit for a few months after Musk did a literal Hitler Salute on the largest stage he could find, but even that wasn’t a lot and it’s pretty much over already.
People, by and large, don’t prioritize morals over comfort. They will always choose the best deal they can get, no matter what the long-term or moral effects are. People who put morals over comfort exist, but they are very rare.
And in most cases, people who shout for boycotts the loudest were never customers to begin with (e.g. me, who has never bought a Tesla, saying I will never buy a Tesla because of Musk. Well, I wouldn’t have bought a Tesla anyway).
You, not having played a single game on that list (1% of 20 games is 0.2 games, so none) seem to be firmly in the camp of “I’m not a customer so I can feel morally superior by not changing anything I do”.
Some chunk of that is from counter-boycotters and anti-trans NGOs (allegedly even some GONGOs like citizengo), who bought up a lot, then dumped them onto G2A, gifted them for cheap, etc.
I did not know that It Takes Two was that popular.
I wonder how many of those are the free version that you can only play when playing with someone who has the paid version
This is number of copies sold. It really did sell that high. And if that blows your mind, wait until you find out Human Fall Flat sold like 40M copies.
Maybe, although the title says “best selling”
I’m pleasantly surprised that it takes two did so well. I hope it shows publishers that there’s a market for couch co-op!
Too bad their newer game (Split Fiction) wasn’t that good. I read good reviews about it, but when I played it it was completely disappointing: stupid story, repetitive games, no “aaahh” moments like in their previous games.
You can hate me for saying this, but there’s no way Minecraft shouldn’t be on that chart. If this data is right Minecraft Revenue and Usage Statistics (2025), the sales between 2020 and 2023 would be ~100M.
I suspect these are the best selling games which released between 2020 and 2025. For instance, Breath of the Wild has sold about 33 million copies, over 10 million more than Tears of the Kingdom but was released in 2017.
If that’s what they are counting, then the graphic should say that…
Their source is this page on the Video Game Sales Wiki, which does say “The following titles are the best-selling games released in the 2020s, as of 2025.”. That’s how I read the headline, but you’re right, it would have helped if Visual Capitalist had clarified by including that bit of info.
Yup, and the article (Ranked: The Best-Selling Video Games Since 2020} that was published using that data mis-represents it:
This visualization ranks the best-selling video games from 2020 to 2025 based on global unit sales using data from Video Game Sales Wiki (Fandom).
IMO - I find the “Visual Capitalist” site to be a questionable source of information… There are quite a few red flags when it comes to that site.
This has to be one of the worst designed data visualizations I’ve seen in a long time. God knows social media isn’t wanting for shitty dataviz, but this one is particularly awful. It’s an assault on my senses trying to read it.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised from a company called “visual capitalist”.
Pretty much all single player games guess we best roll another overwatch clone
Since the graphic is counting sales in units sold I guess free to download “live services” wouldn’t really appear.
Would be interesting to see the same counting revenues.
I had no idea Animal Crossing was that high. It’s a stupid game with no point to it… and I can’t help but play it 2-3 times a week, even if it’s just to check in. It definitely has its moments. I gave my wife shit for paying $60 for it, and I played it daily for most of the year since we got it. (She dropped it after a couple weeks, which tanked my progress since only the first player can advance the island. We started over with me starting an island and she played here and there. Then she quit, and I wanted to start over again… and she hasn’t used the new island yet, and I’ve had it for over 7 months now. It will be my forever island.)
And Hogwarts over everything but Animal Crossing? That’s kinda wild. I did not think that game was that big. Currently playing it, it was recently given away on Epic Game Store, I wonder if giveaways count (probably not). It’s basically the Harry Potter simulator we’ve all wanted for the last 20-25 years. Whenever those books and movies started coming out. Except it doesn’t have Harry Potter, or anything from the series but the places.
Removed by mod
Well at least one of those Switch Sports sales was a double buy by me because somehow the first digital copy I purchased, and played many times and put maybe 20 hours into golf, just decided to up and pretend I never bought it. One day it just told me I needed to buy it and my trial period was over. Despite having already bought it years before. I couldn’t find the proof of purchase email even though I had one for every other game. I emailed Nintendo, they said they had no record of my purchase even though they could clearly see dozens of hours played across multiple sports. I also have a video of my kid playing it like a year before this happened. I eventually just re bought it. It was honestly one of the weirdest and unsettling experiences of my life. Like a portion of my life was deleted and only I remembered. Even my brother was doubting me.
Yeah, Helldivers 2 made it on the list!
For Super Earth! o7
I own a lot of games and I own zero of these titles. 🤷♂️
Palworld is worth a shot
Palworld numbers are amazing.
It’s crazy that I only own two of these games and they couldn’t be more different. Animal Crossing and Cyberpunk 2077.
I haven’t bought a single one of these. I’ve played It Takes Two with my brother over Parsec though. Where can I collect my hipster certificate?
Animal Crossing was a birthday gift. And technically Stadia refunded my money for Cyberpunk.
The .0 here just seems incorrect. They only appear have the first significant digit.















