I was wondering, given that the game will likely pass the 100M download mark before the end of the first month on the market (just in a handful of countries), if Pokémon GO downloads should count as single "sales" on the ranking for the biggest selling franchises in Gaming History. One might argue that the game beeing free automatically excludes Pokémon GO downloads to be counted as acutal sales, but given that dividing the money spent by people in in-app purchases there's a small ammount of money for every single downoad of the app it makes me think that maybe the App should be counted and, if not by it's total downloads, at least by the number of people who made in-app purchases!

no, because downloads are not sales
the game is free to play

if you count downloads, the best selling franchise in the world is angry birds.
no pokemon or mario comes close

Well, SEGA is counting Sonic Dash so...I guess that would be fair.

Uhhhh, sure, if you want to.

It's not like there's any official standard, so people can count however they want. It's not that important.

Which is why Tetris will forever reign as king

Absolutely not lol

I mean you personally can but you're comparing apples and oranges.

No. It's not a sale if it hasn't been sold. There is absolutely no need to combine categories of things that are very different. It's just fine as "times downloaded".

No.Sales and downloads are two very different things, and to be quite honest, its next to impossible to compare them in that regard(adoptance level).A fairer metric would be how much the game earned compared to another.

I wouldn't and I love Pokemon Go. Asking people to download a game free on their phone is not comparable to asking them to spend $30-60 on a game on a dedicated platform that costs another $150-400.

there are different ways to distribute a game and free to play cannot be the best sold game. It can make the most profit or be the most downloaded free to play game ever, sure, but it just doesn't go in the same list as traditional games being sold at full price.