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Capcom releases lifetime sales numbers
Which franchise is the king of the Capcom castle?

Hidden within Capcom's latest financial results, the company is sure to sent rabid fans into a frenzy with the news that it has kept tabs on a wealth of sales information for all of its big unit selling franchises and breakout individual titles over the last two decades.

The figures date back over the last twenty-two years, and they provide gamers with an account of how well their favourite Capcom titles have sold across the world as of May 22, 2008.

As first pointed out by Next-Gen, leading the pack as the all-time franchise sales record holder is the classic action-horror series Resident Evil which has done big business since its inception with over thirty-four million units sold, giving it a large lead over both Mega Man and Street Fighter who popped up second and third on the list, respectively.

While the Resident Evil series proves to be the biggest selling franchise, the biggest selling individual title went to the classic arcade brawler Street Fighter II which sold in excess of six million copies on the SNES.

As Capcom did not define its use of titles in the document, it's not clear how they factored in different territorial releases (with their different game titles) of its catalogue of games into the final tally.


Worldwide Franchise Sales

Resident Evil - 34.5 million
Mega Man - 28 million
Street Fighter - 25 million
Disney Titles - 13.2 million
Devil May Cry - 9.5 million
Onimusha - 7.8 million
Monster Hunter - 6.3 million
Dino Crisis - 4.4 million
Ghosts 'n Goblins - 4.3 million
Final Fight - 3.2 million
Breath of Fire - 3 million
Ace Attorney - 2.8 million
Commando - 1.2 million
1942 - 1.2 million

Top Ten Individual Title Sales Worldwide
Street Fighter II (SNES) - 6.3 million
Resident Evil 2 (PlayStation) - 4.9 million
Street Fighter II Turbo (SNES) - 4.1 million
Resident Evil 3 Nemesis( PlayStation) - 3.5 million
Resident Evil (PlayStation) - 2.75 million
Dino Crisis (PlayStation) - 2.4 million
Devil May Cry 4 (PS3, Xbox 360) -2.3 million
Devil May Cry (PlayStation 2) - 2.16 million
Monster Hunter Freedom (PSP) - 2.15 million
Onimusha: Warlords (PlayStation 2) - 2 million

http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=11616&sid=6de1b915bda75828bd8f7e7b5d34f85b&title=Capcom+releases+lifetime+sales+numbers
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I really expected Street Fighter to top the list. RE, ok, I can see that. But Mega Man topping SF is a shock to me...

Street Fighter still hasn't outperformed it's original SNES release. And that was at the height of the franchises popularity. Mega Man lasted longer with gamers, but has since been gutted to be mostly shit whereas RE has only gotten better. Though RE3 was kind of a downer. RE4 was enough to fix the franchise and then some.

Disney Titles must mean the old SNES and Genesis shit. Impressive sales I guess. Onimusha sucks. Monster Hunter is only huge outside of Japan but that number will go from 6.3 to 8.0+ by the end of the year. And finally, sequel to Dragon Quarter plz.

Edit: Oh, hay look, top game breakdown at the bottom. Yes, see, as you can clearly see here with, ahem, street fighter 2, blahblah already said it.

Yes, I wasn't that surprised by RE topping SF as RE has just kept getting bigger, but while I know MM has been around forever through 10+ iterations, it still surprised me since SF2 was HOOOOOGE on the SNES, and having seen and aquired or purchased SF-series stuff on every platform since, pretty much had assumed that there were more players of that sort of thing.

I think also, anecdotally, both SF and MM suffer from being "old-school" franchises which were of little interest to those who came onboard to consoles in the PS1 phase, who preferred 3-D stuff. While RE was in fact "that 3-D stuff".

RE has kept more or less up-to-date (though repetitive) like something like MGS, while neither SF or MM have made a true update to "modern" games, like Mario. As disinterested as I am in Mario, MM just had a couple bog-standard 3-d platformers, no more notable than a random Spyro the Dragon or Crash Bandicoot title.

Bah. Time to go to work.

Front page worthy.

Dino Crisis is the surprise for me.  I had no idea it did well.

Nod. I always had the impression that it was a bit of a failure, sales-wise.

Unless I'm missing it somewhere, how did RE4 NOT get on that top 10 list? I thought for sure it'd be up there.

It was released for the gamecube first. You know how many gamecubes were put out there? Also, some titles, since content was different, had different numbers:

Resident Evil 4   December 2005   PS2   2,000,000
Resident Evil 4   January 2005   GC   1,600,000
Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition   May 2007   Wii   1,250,000

So, it would be there if they were released on the same day like say, DMC4.

Total RE4 sales are 4.9 million which would tie it for 2nd place.

As far as Megaman is concerned, it's been around forever and there are Gameboy games, etc. Not a surprise that it has sold well as a series, it has 120 titles. 120! Average sales per game are not terribly impressive.

The better list is here:

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10630&Itemid=2

Go 1942!

It always kind of made me laugh that a Japanese game company made a very successful arcade game that involved you flying around in an uber American prop plane decimating entire Japanese fleets.