This past week Capcom revealed that life-to-date sales of
Resident Evil 5 have overtaken
Street Fighter II, making the fifth (lackluster) entry in the
Resident Evil franchise the Japanese publisher’s new best-selling video game of all time.
The update to Capcom’s Platinum Titles list on their investor site reveals that LTD sales of
Resident Evil 5 have now reached 6.5 million units, beating out
Street Fighter II‘s 6.3 million. This places the classic fighter smack in the middle of a nasty Jill sandwich, with
Resident Evil 6 and its 5.2 million in sales stalled out in third place.
While the news of
Street Fighter II‘s fall from the top of Capcom’s charts is devastating to
Resident Evil 5 haters/
SFII lovers (like myself), there is a footnote in the sales data that provides a small bit of comfort.
RE5‘s life-to-date sales are calculated as a combined total from the PS3, Xbox 360, and full-game downloads via PSN (which, thanks to its
PlayStation Plus appearance, is the likely culprit for the unexpected bump in sales), Xbox Live, and PC. On the other hand,
Street Fighter II has only the original Super Nintendo version to thank for its 6.3 million in LTD sales. None of the fighter’s various releases on other platforms or downloadable services are recorded in the data.
We may never know exactly how Capcom’s top two selling games stack up against each other, but in my mind the missing
Street Fighter II sales data has to be more than enough to close the gap on the yukky
Resident Evil 5.
Capcom’s top 10 Platinum Titles are as follows:
Release Title Platform Units
(000 copies) *millions
1 2009/3 Resident Evil 5 PS3,Xbox 360,DL 6,500
2 1992/6 Street Fighter II SFC 6,300
3 2012/10 Resident Evil 6 PS3,Xbox 360,DL 5,200
4 1998/1 Resident Evil 2 PS 4,960
5 2010/12 Monster Hunter Freedom 3 PSP,DL 4,800
6 1993/7 Street Fighter II Turbo SFC 4,100
7 2008/3 Monster Hunter Freedom Unite PSP,DL 3,600
8 1999/9 Resident Evil 3 Nemesis PS 3,500
9 2009/2 Street Fighter IV PS3,Xbox 360,DL 3,300
10 2013/9 Monster Hunter 4 3DS,DL 2,800
