Strategy Informer: "Things that go boom are just cool. It's an undeniable fact of nature, and if there is any medium of entertainment that realizes and embraces this, it is video games. Explosions have been a winning part of the gaming formula since the beginning and that probably isn't something that's going to change any time soon. With all the collective firepower of gaming at our disposal though, it could be hard to single those few particular booms that were in fact the coolest. No worries, we've got your covered with five blasts that will continue to rock the world even today."
In honour of PlayStation's 30th birthday yesterday in the US, data company Circana has dug out figures showing the top 20 best-selling PlayStation video games ever (date-range Jan 1995 to July 2025). Don't get too excited.
This is a great reminder of how game sales have become more concentrated in a smaller number of games/series over time. In the PS1/PS2 era a game was a success if it sold a million or a few million copies. The GTA games (3/Vice City/San Andreas) were pretty big outliers in selling as much as they did during the PS2 era. So in the minds of a lot of gamers something like FF VII feels like it was as big of a PS1 game as God of War 2018 was for PS4, but in reality far fewer people bought it (though it has obviously reached additional people through remasters, etc.).
What this says to me is, not many people are buying a PS to play PS exclusives. Like so many false narratives, like Xbox gamers don't buy games! It seems Playstation as a default system is a vanilla system to play call of duty, Minecraft, GTA games and a sports games.
if you look back into the PS history, it has always been the 3rd parties who sells the most games. it was just that the PS1 and PS2 were so dominant that many of those 3rd party games were exclusives. so, back during the PS1 and PS2 days, the strategy was "to sell as many consoles as possible in order to sell more 1st party exclusives" to ride on that wave. The strategy to push many 1st party exclusives to sell consoles only started with the PS3 when many of those prior 3rd party exclusives went multiplat but more accurately, it started with the PSP.
Sony saw with the PSP, which was being trounced in sales by the DS, that 3rd party exclusives are hard to come by if you're not dominating the market. So they started building more 1st party games and when the PS3 were facing difficulties in sales, they knew they had to rely on their own to differentiate the PS3 from the 360. So the strategy back then changed to "release more 1st party exclusives in order to sell more consoles".
the only manufacturer that is still consistently selling their hardware to play 1st party exclusives, is Nintendo, and that was because they gave up the armrace for power thus they can't rely on 3rd parties anymore as all multiplats play better on competing consoles. AND that's also why they are the most ominous in going after emulators and also patent trolling!
so, you're not wrong there, but not an "aha!" moment or anything. it has been this way since the last, at least, 15 years for Playstation.
@zerobalance
So... what this tells you is that Call of duty, being the absolute check writer that it is, has been outsold by Last of us, God of war, 2 Spider man games..... Saying Playstation exclusives doesn't sell is like saying call of duty doesn't sell because they have outsold some of iterations. Does that make sense to you?
Leading domestic game companies have entered into an unprecedented competition to win orders for Starcraft, Blizzard's representative IP (intellectual property).
Weird MS is letting go of a good IP. I don’t mind it but hopefully the best dev wins and I’m not sure who that is outbid those.
What they are bidding for are exclusive rights to develop the IP. Microsoft/blizzard is essentially licensing it out to the highest bidder, not selling the IP.
I wonder if we'll see Starcraft Ghost come out of this. And if we do, I wonder if it'll be a free-to-play gacha game.
Given the potential developers, looks inevitable there will be free to play gacha versions. But given south korea’s love for starcraft there would be one that is inline with starcraft 1&2.
Might want to expect some sort of backdoor cheat that only south koreans know of lol 🤣
Everything you need to know about Modern Warfare III coming to Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.
Will be interesting to see what sort of numbers GP users draw in come tomorrow. It is believed that this is one many have been waiting for.
Darth,
That is not accurate; this game is old, and most people who want it have already bought it. You might get a small number of subs, but we will mostly see a good influx of players(not new subs) from people with Game Pass who will try it, which is what happened with D4.
CoD: BO 6 will be the test for actual sub numbers.
That's fair... seeing as many have been saying they want CoD in GP. My comment was more of , now that its here... what can it do. Im sure there will be other titles in the franchise that will either entice or turn off different users.
No one's buying a console and signing up for a monthly bill just to get this game to avoid buying it. That's ridiculous. Besides everyone bagged the crap out of this on release for the 4 hour campaign.
The explosion in that killzone 2 video "big set pieces, made my brain explode. So did the one at the end of the cryengine 2 vid.
And oh, how could I forget the CoD4 nuke.
Far Cry 2 has some nice explosions too.
Cool -you remembered to add some of the more obscure ones (kudos for adding Star Fox 64!) and remote mines definitely deserve to be on that list.
Fallout 3 had a huge nuclear explosion, and you really can't forget games like Half-Life 2, Crysis, Far Cry 2, etc. which basically begged you to blow stuff up.