The juggernauts of video gaming — companies like Electronic Arts, Activision and Ubisoft — are sinking more and more money into marketing their AAA games. The process is similar to that with a blockbuster movie: cooking the games from scratch with development staffs the size of a small country, garnishing them with voice talent from popular movies and TV shows (Kevin Spacey in the latest Call of Duty, Peter Dinklage in Destiny) and plastering them everywhere with an expansive marketing budget, hoping for a big payday.
Sometimes it works. Last year’s big payday went to Rockstar Games, when the hotly anticipated Grand Theft Auto V shattered records and proved video games could be even bigger moneymakers than the summer blockbusters. The title made over $1 billion in sales over a matter of weeks. It also includes microtransactions in its multiplayer arenas (though universally reviled, at least GTA V’s are done well), allowing for further income from dedicated players.
Slideshow: The 10 Best-Selling Video Games of 2014
If Rockstar set a new bar for game sales, numbers from video games data repository VGChartz.com indicate it was one that other publishers fell far below this year. “Destiny,” the latest offering from Bungie, the developers of the acclaimed Halo series, received a lukewarm reception and earned publisher Activision only 3.8 million unit sales in the U.S. – a disappointing result compared to the 21 million sales of GTA V last year.
We’ve collected the sales data from each platform in the U.S. and collated it all into a list of the 10 best-selling video games of the year. It makes for slightly disappointing reading: A couple of the entries are still vestigial sales from last year’s hits, others are new iterations of age-old franchises, and most of the new blood on the list was not warmly received by critics or the general public.
Related: Video Game Changers: 21 Titles that Rocked the Industry
Maybe this was just an unlucky year for video gaming. Or perhaps the sales figures are an indication that customers want games that have thought and originality, and are executed well, rather than reams of marketing guff that spins lukewarm products as God’s gift to gaming-kind.
Meanwhile, small game studios have seen something of a renaissance. Thanks in part to platforms like Steam’s greenlight program and, of course, crowdsourcing initiatives like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Patreon, it’s now getting easier and easier for indie developers to provide us with quality, thought-provoking titles. "Papers, please,” for example, places you in the uncomfortable moral position of being a border officer in a war-torn Soviet nation, while “The Stanley Parable” is a clever deconstruction of a video game’s illusion of choice, underscored by a sense of wit that’s channeled heavily from Douglas Adams.
Maybe the bigger publishers could stand to take some notes from these guys.
Click here to see the 10 bestselling video games of 2014
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