Wikipedia, backing up my much-earlier statement: “By 1982, [Pac-Man] had sold 400,000 arcade machines worldwide and an estimated 7 billion coins had been inserted into Pac-Man machines.” And, “The game produced one billion dollars in 1980 alone.”
A billion dollars, a quarter at a time, in one year. That is simply insane.
Well, not quite. A large percentage of that is probably the arcade cabinets/inserts themselves.
How about largest online community/largest online game?
The winner would probably be League of Legends with an active 32 million member community, over 12 million daily gamers.
Any love for Myst?
Sure, it’s been blown away commercially since its release, but it held the PC title’s most popular game for 9 years until The Sims came along.
Myst sold a little over 6 million copies on the PC in its heyday. It’s age has passed.
Weird that zelda isn’t on the franchise list.
That’s specifically not including cabinet sales, which account for another billion with a “B” by 1982. Quoting the well-cited Wikipedia article:
solitaire.exe
But hasn’t WOW easily surpassed that? In terms of online revenue (subscription, pay for digital items, etc) + sales of expansions?
Many many times over. But because there’s no agreed-upon metric of what makes the most successful game ever (or even reliable sales numbers to make an argument with), this question will always be answered a different way.