I’m not a fan of Street Fighter. But people are drastically underplaying its success, influence, and legacy. First off, Street Fighter 2 is one of the most successful games of all time earning 10.6 billion dollars in arcades during the 1990s (a lot more now considering inflation) the game is the main inspiration for the entire fighting game genre, and has generated tens of billions of USD (considering inflation) mainly from arcade sales, and given it’s significantly older.
Also, I don’t like fighters, but even I’m well aware of its greater importance than the likes of Fortnite, PubG, and League of Legends based on the criteria listed… I mean, I didn’t even know the latter three were franchises, I thought they were just games, and relatively new ones… far too new to be considered the greatest game franchises in history.
There are also franchises like Warcraft that popularized two genres: MMO RPGs and RTS.
The Sims franchise have sold a combined 200 million copies (Sims 4 has more than 70 million players) and became a major influence on a variety of genres as well as nearly two decades of popularity, and was a benchmark game franchise in the sandbox genre vastly exceeding SimCity. Although, SimCity and the Sims can be said to be part of the same franchise in the way the various Mario game series are.
Then, of course, there’s Pacman which brought PC, Arcade, and Home console videogaming into the mainstream, and is still played to this day over 40 years later.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
