The statistic ranks the best-selling console games of all time. Wii Sports is the best-selling video game with a little over 82.6 million units shipped worldwide. Data for global hardware unit sales by platform can be found here.
Best-selling console games of all time
Given that the top-selling Wii Sports console game was predominantly sold in a bundle with the hugely successful Wii console from Nintendo, it may come as no surprise that Wii Sports dominates the console game field with roughly 82 million units sold. The second best-selling console game of all time, Super Mario Bros. played on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), first reached the market in 1985, making it one of the oldest, most-loved and most-influential games worldwide. Played originally on the NES 8-bit video game console, Super Mario Bros. games have been developed for almost all of Nintendo’s later gaming consoles. As of March 2013, a Super Mario Bros. game for the Wii console had sold almost 28 million units.
Sales of video games (played on consoles) in the United States were down in 2012 at around 6.790 billion U.S. dollars, though sales of games in other formats (among them mobile apps, digital full games, and social networking games) were up from the year before at around 7.7 million U.S. dollars. In 2012, computer game sales were worst, amounting to around 0.38 billion U.S. dollars in sales. Though computer game sales were worst, household penetration of PCs was higher than that of smartphones and game consoles as of 2012. Nielsen reported that the Nintendo Wii could be found in 38 percent of U.S. households, trailing only PCs (at 93 percent penetration) and some mobile phones. Of other game consoles, only the Microsoft Xbox 360 came close, with a household penetration rate of 26 percent.
