A run through of the top ten PC games ever made. The most addictive and enjoyable titles from the last few decades of PC gaming.
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?
Discover 10 timeless video games from the past that remain absolutely playable today. From Chrono Trigger to DOOM, these classics have aged like fine wine!
Hot damn that's a good list. The only one i never played is AOE2 and i never finshed Chrono Trigger but it was damn good.
Speaking of what's old but holds up amazingly well and plays like a dream.. i played Symphony of the Night for the first time in 2019.. yep that's right. It became one of my favourite games of all time that i replay almost every year. I couldn't believe how good it was. That is almost impossible for me with newer games let alone older ones. Truly a special gem.
The only one I’d disagree with is doom. It shows its age badly I think. After 5 minutes of play these days you put it down.
TNS: "inZOI has been recently released in Early Access and surprisingly, The Sims welcomed it with open arms and a fruitcake to boot."
websites that use pagination for no good reason are really starting to get on my nerves
oh great, homeworld's there :)
Anyway a shitton are missing (sin of a solar empire, theme park, sim city, crysis.....), the biggest one being baldur's gate.
Neither Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament? Wow.
I don't see KoTOR or any of Blizzard's games there, but I did see Rome. Kudos on that ;)
Any best PC game list that has the Sims instead of Baldurs Gate is worthless to me.