Upcoming Debate

John Scerri
Apr 23, 2017
3 min read

In a few weeks’ time, as an assignment, I will have a debate against one of my classmates. The title of the debate is Can originality in games be commercially successful?, and I must persuade the audience that original games are not commercially successful.

But what makes a commercially successful game?

In order to answer this question, I looked at last year’s top selling games. Chris Pereira (2017) on Gamespot made a list of the bestselling games in the US according to NPD group (2017) which was also backed up by Brenna Hillier (2017) on VG247.

Top Selling Games 2016:

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
Battlefield 1
The Division
NBA 2K17
Madden NFL 17
Grand Theft Auto V
Overwatch (no Battle.net sales) (Remake of Team Fortress)
Call of Duty: Black Ops III
FIFA 17
Final Fantasy XV

After having the list of the top most successful games, I searched for how commercially successful these games where.

VGChartz (2017) website, keeps track of all the sales done by video games. And after searching each game listed above, I found out their global sales per unit sold. For the purpose of this post, I only included the sales on the platform that the game has sold best on, which in every case happened to be the PS4 (Sony, 2014).

Global Sales of Games on PS4:

Call of Duty: infinite Warfare = 7.03 Million Units
Battlefield 1 = 6.78 Million Units
The Division = 4.29 Million Units
NBA 2K17 = 3.03 Million Units
Madden NFL 17 = 3.04 Million Units
Grand Theft Auto V = 15.02 Million Units
Overwatch = 3.02 Million Units
Call of Duty: Black Ops III = 14.8 Million Units
FIFA 17 = 17 10.67 Million Units
Final Fantasy XV = 4.51 Million Units

This list already gives us an idea of what a commercially successful game looks like, but there is one problem. I looked at the most popular games, which in return does not let me get an average of sales per units on generic games. I found another list including recommended games of 2016 by GamesRadar Staff (2016) on all platforms.

Recommended Games for 2016:

Thumper
Reigns
Inside
Superhot
Pokémon Sun/Moon
The Witness
Dragon Quest Builders
The Last Guardian
Street Fighter 5
Watch Dogs 2

And again, I looked up their sales on VGChartz (2017) and Steamspy (2017).

Sales for Recommended Games (2016):

Thumper = 45,148 Units
Reigns = 300,126 Units
Inside = 415,575 Units
Superhot = 503,076 Units
Pokémon Sun/Moon = 13.33 Million Units
The Witness = 1223 Units
Dragon Quest Builders = 484,512 Units
The Last Guardian = 1.08 Million Units
Street Fighter 5 = 116,524
Watch Dogs 2 = 2.96 Million Units

At this point, I can have an average of how much a game approximately should be sold to be commercially successful by adding the ten games sold units and dividing again by ten.

Average Game Commercial Success: 2 Million Units

Best Games CommercialSuccess: 5 Million Units

References

Games Radar, 2016. GamesRadar+'s Game of the Year 2016. [Online] Available at: http://www.gamesradar.com/best-games-2016/ [Accessed 23 April 2017].

Hillier, B., 2017. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was the best-selling game of 2016 despite all your protests – but Battlefield 1 was hot on its heels. [Online] Available at: https://www.vg247.com/2017/01/20/call-of-duty-infinite-warfare-was-the-best-selling-game-of-2016-despite-all-your-protests-but-battlefield-1-was-hot-on-its-heels/ [Accessed 23 April 2017].

NPD, 2017. NPD. [Online] Available at: https://www.npdgroup.co.uk/wps/portal/npd/uk/home/ [Accessed 23 April 2017].

Pereira, C., 2017. 2016's Best-Selling Games in the US Revealed. [Online] Available at: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/2016s-best-selling-games-in-the-us-revealed/1100-6447090/ [Accessed 23 April 2017].

Sony, 2014. Playstation. Japan: Sony.

Steam Spy, 2017. Steam Spy. [Online] Available at: http://steamspy.com/ [Accessed 23 April 2017].

VG Chartz, 2017. VG Chartz. [Online] Available at: http://www.vgchartz.com/ [Accessed 23 April 2017].