How to tell Modern Warfare’s sweep of rapidly exploding global conflict? Its tightly contained levels, while driven by sensational set-pieces, hardly attempt to spin the tale of international intrigue and personal strife, Machiavellian villains and gruff special forces operatives.
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?
Free for Playstation owners
Players are using hacks to gain an advantage in the game, such as aimbots and wall hacks. The first gives a player superhuman aiming abilities, while a wall hack lets you see through walls to gauge where other players are.
“These hacks are typically used by PC players, but those playing on PC via Xbox Game Pass are identified as Xbox players in multiplayer lobbies.”
This is pretty dumb to say the least.
That's a WTF, they suppose to be labeled as pc users even if its on PC game pass. They mess that up big time.
If AI keeps getting better (and it will) it's just a matter of time before there's more sophisticated cheats even for consoles, and they wouldn't even need to be running on it, I have little doubt about that.
Don't Gamepass online games have anti-cheat systems?
If not, that's pretty dumb. Microsoft need to fix that asap.
They won't ever fix this problem, unless they (developers, publishers, Sony and MS) go after the cheat providers directly. You no longer need to hack consoles to use hacks. During the ps360 days, they were going after cheat devices, but it was a cat and mouse game. These cheating methods were around during those days, it's nothing new, but they kept it under control. Since the PS4/Xbox one generation, they stopped going after these cheating devices and it became widespread. Which I find odd, since they started charging for online play (PS4).
Possibly, this is because the companies were going after cheats because the same cheats were being used to pirate the games, whereas today, the companies use online verification to prevent piracy, thus eliminating the need to go after people who cheat only to gain an advantage in the game. As long as the cheater remains below the radar, and does not completely break the game, the companies look the other way as their wallets are not threatened by it. (that is my completely Uneducated opinion on the matter)
I mean, COD games was always filled with hackers, nothing new. I can’t blame MS on this. Activision had years to try and fix this. Might take MS some time to make some change.
It all depends…
Microsoft’s guidance on how to handle gamepass on pc and their love to force crossplay with pc seems like a them issue.
And they own activision, so it is still a them issue.
It's easy. Explosion, slow motion fall, ambush, slow motion scene, gunfight, someone almost dies, slow motion fall to the ground, explosion, ambush, gunfight, someone does die, explosion, slow motion end scene.
Lets face it, stories are what most FPS games lack and COD is a good example (except maybe Black Ops, that was decent)