One of the biggest developments in gaming isn’t just the growing number of games to play, with thousands more being released every year, but how sticky the biggest blockbusters are, monopolizing players’ money and attention long after they’ve come out. And not just live-service multiplayer games either. New sales data shows how over a third of 2024's best selling games, like Elden Ring, came out years ago.
Market research firm Circana released its list of the top-20 best-selling games of 2024 for the U.S. on Thursday, and it shows for just how long some old games are sticking around. Perennial favorites like Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Minecraft (2011) always show up on these lists, but single-player RPGs like Elden Ring (2022) and Hogwarts Legacy (2023) are now too. In fact if you remove the EA Sports MVP Bundle, which includes Madden 25 and Sports FC 25, games already on the list elsewhere, then over a third of the top-20 list includes old games:
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
- EA Sports College Football 25
- Helldivers II
- Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero
- NBA 2K25
- Madden NFL 25
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023)
- EA Sports FC 25
- Elden Ring
- EA Sports MVP Bundle
- Hogwarts Legacy
- Dragon’s Dogma II
- WWE 2K24
- MLB: The Show 24
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Minecraft
- Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
- Tekken 8
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
- NBA2K24
It’s hard to come up with any unifying theory of why these seven games (three more than 2023) remained such huge sellers last year. Annual sports games like NBA 2K24 and Call of Duty’s unparalleled popularity have historically helped them stick around months after release. GTA V is required to play GTA Online, which continues to be one of the most popular multiplayer games, and the launch of GTA VI is closer than ever. And every year there’s a new generation of kids getting hooked on Minecraft.
Elden Ring was no doubt helped by its GOTY contender expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, coming out in 2024. And Hogwarts Legacy? Well, who knows. It hit Switch in late 2023 and finally started getting its price slashed in half during recent sales. Spider-Man 2, meanwhile, seems like people’s go-to game when they upgrade to a PS5 for the first time.
Other notable takeaways from last year’s best-selling games are that not a single Nintendo first-party game charted, a testament to what a week year overall it was for the console despite a late breakout in Mario Party Jamboree. Star Wars Outlaws didn’t chart at all either. In fact a Ubisoft game hasn’t charted in the top 10 since 2020's Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, no doubt part of its calculous in delaying Assassin’s Creed Shadows a second time for extra polish as the family-owned publisher battles for survival.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard was another high-profile absence. In addition to not making the list despite its predecessor eventually selling over 10 million, it wasn’t a top-20 best-selling game for December 2024 either, less than two months after it launched. Publisher EA released its preliminary financial early pointing to the action-RPG coming in severely under expectations with 1.5 million players for the quarter, 50 percent below its forecast. Whether that was an unrealistic goal to make up for the game’s notoriously long and difficult development cycle is another matter.
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