This week's "What They've Been Playing" features discussion of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Shellshock 2: Blood Trails, Terminator Salvation, Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon, TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, Shatter and much more. They follow that up with some gaming news including the new Left 4 Dead DLC, the Starcraft II delay, the announcement of a Wii-port of COD4, and plenty more.
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?
Following Left 4 Dead's undying legacy, the developer of the game shares that a new likewise project is in the works.
L4D had potential to be so much more. The issue was that the release of the second game just one year after the first added a decent amount of content which was much needed, then there was nothing except for a few small content updates spread far between.
This is one of the only games I can think of that benefits from a yearly release, or at least a yearly DLC so it doesn't split the player base.
The games just got too samey and lack content.. it's a shame they didn't keep up the pace, I know you can download new maps but it doesn't change the overall game or add new enemies etc.
Regardless of what Valve officially said they didn’t need to do a sequel that fast, things could have easily been added to the original overtime and the sad thing is the characters and atmosphere of the original was better than the sequel. I mean we went from the dark, grim city streets to the sunny south where we are hitting massive menacing tanks with frying pans.
I honestly believe Valve killed it because it was a Turtle Rock game at its core and Valve wanted it to be known as an Valve only IP moving forward
They even brought back the original survivors just to kill one of them off (even though in the original they were heading North to Canada)
Lol L4D2 came out in 2009, and you are saying it should have been a 2020s type live service game. It's just a great game, it doesn't need battle passes and skins.
This attitude is why devs are afraid to make any multiplayer game that isn't a live service.
Also in these current economic times live services is just a no go when people are being more frugal with their purchasing power. I don't do any subscription services anymore which means I can't do multiplayer on a console even if I wanted too. Something the console manufacturers should think about if they want to get players to even try their online stuff.
This week, Blizzard Entertainment dropped both 'StarCraft: Remastered' and 'StarCraft II Campaign Collection' into PC Game Pass.
Hopefully these get released on Switch and Playstation, along with Age of Empires. There’s a severe lack of good RTS games on both those platforms.
