Always have to shake my head when I see these lists. So many great games, and this is what the masses play. Tsk, Tsk, Tsk.

Got to thank them for supporting the industry though. All those royalties go to Sony and MS so they can create so incredible expereinces. Without them, we wouldn't have stuff like Gran Turismo, Horizon, Forza, Gears, and Uncharted, or even more important PSVR. So keep on throwing money at these titles, buy the DLC, and keep funding great content.

Or adding games onto PS+/GwG are just part of the marketing deals the companies make, like Destiny 2 on PS4 and Battlefield 1 on Xbox. BF1 just went to GwG a couple days ago though so wouldn’t impact this list. No doubt you’d see D2 on the PS4 list if it weren’t given away “free”. 

wow, so "many" exclusive games... but yeah, basically they dont matter anymore that much since an decade or more now...

I don't think I'd say that exclusives on PS4/XB1 don't matter.

Uncharted 4, Horizon: Zero Dawn, God of War, and Spider-Man will each sell 10+ mill on PS4 alone. Depending on its release date, we can probably add The Last of Us: Part 2 as well.

Just because there aren't a lot of exclusives in the top 10 does not mean they dont matter.

AAA western titles are the major system sellers for a majority of PS/XB owners but exclusives are the titles that help consumers pick one over the other.

Without exclusives PS4 & XBO are pretty interchangeable as the specs, features, services & AAA support is very similar.

Do you need the base game to play the expansions?  If so, then yes, we can tell via this list that GOW4 outsold Destiny 1 and 2 on PS4.

Also, that is a lot of iterative nostalgia on that list.

Whenever a new expansion comes out they include the base game for new players. For example the taken king had a version that had the base game and the expansion.

People are not reading these rankings the correct way. Besides the fact that these lists doesn't count bundles (which harms 1st party games), ranking only a top 10 list for a console in a gen is just not enough to see the whole picture. When you have hundreds of games in your console a top 10 is inconclusive. See PS1 against Wii for example, PS1 only had one 10+m seller while Wii had ten 10+m sellers, but in the end they ended up selling similar software.

Call of Duty is a tricky thing too, because like sports games they have a game each year that people will buy anyway. Is like a commitment with a tv series that you like. If there was a ranking for the most watched tv series of the last 5 years, you won't see it like....Game of thrones season 6 #1, Game of Trhones season 7#2, ... for example. You will rank the series as a whole. People should consider doing the same with Call of Duty. It's like GTA, only in that case there is only one game in this gen.

And yes, FPS and sport games are some of the most popular genres, but they have less competition in their own genre than others like Action/Adventure Games or RPGs. When there is more competition in your field, the success is more shared among the parts.

What i'm trying to say is that, you can have 1 game that sells 10m, or 10 games that sells 1m but in both cases they sum the same number of sales. Just because exclusives with different names don't rank in that top 10, doen't mean they are not important for that console. If for example, in that NPD list for PS4, Uncharted 4, Horizon Zero Dawn and Spiderman are in the 11-20 ranking, believe me, those exclusive really matter in the end for PS4.

Gotcha.  Thanks.

These numbers just don’t add up. VGC has Destiny 2 on Xbox at around 1.4m and fallout 4 at 2.8m and I know Vgc doesn’t track digital but that would mean that Destiny 2 has a digital attach rate of 60% while fallout 4 only 20%. The same goes for other games on these lists.