GTA IV is biggest global seller of 2008 Comments by Robert Purchese

Nice to see that all the top five are of rather decent quality too!

SSB sold 5 MILLION? 0_0

GTA 4 sold 6 MILLION? 0_0

The others i can understand :)

3.5 million Wii Fit sales? Cha-f'kin-ching!

"As of June 30, 2008, Nintendo has sold 6.42 million copies of Mario Kart Wii worldwide." from wikipedia article about mario kart wii and it has a reference....so this is proven wrong from day one.

But nobody buy's wii games :s

Is anybody still buying that piece of crap?

Edit: Sorry I forgot to add GTA4.

I ask this because Mario Kart, Wii Fit and Smash Bros Brawl sales are still doing well worldwide.

Quite surprised to see Wii Fit in there given how much it costs. No wonder developers are abandoning the hardcore market like it's got the Black Death.

Wii fit would have probably overtaken GTA IV sales but for shortages

I dont know, but...combine sales of COD 4 from box, ps and pc....


http://vgchartz.com/games/

Huh. If the list separated between console versions, for instance making different entries for GTA IV Xbox and GTA IV PS3, then the top five would be pretty much all Nintendo exclusives. Maybe GTA for the 360 could make fifth.

This list will pretty much remain the exact same for the rest of the year. Don't know what title would be able to challenge any of those games, or anything that can change the order they're listed in. Yay exciting.

I don't think the list is very useful, by the way.

Zzz retail. What about digital?!

Come on casual bubble, won't you burst already.

Fuck the Wii.

Come on casual bubble, won't you burst already.


no it will keep floating around making millions and real games will be a thing of the past.

shame.

"Real games" are still doing OK.
Note that all the three nintendo exclusives on the list are developed by nintendo internally.

Mario Kart and Smash Bros not 'real' games??!!

Good grief.

Come on casual bubble, won't you burst already.

Fuck all those fucking casual gamers who buy shit like GTA4.

(and yes - gta4 IS shit, especially when compared to the other gta games)

REAL gamers buy mario kart and smash bros.

it's the casual gamers who buy games purely on the marketing/violence/media attention who buy stuff like wii fit and gta 4.

What real gamers do and do not do is way too Pure Pwnage for me. Guess I am not a real gamer anyway, as I only buy games I enjoy playing; that is probably way too softcore for real gamers. Whatever.

GTA 4 also got a perfect score from quite a few professional reviews, and it has a metascore of 98. That is the highest metascoreever for a game.

I agree that GTA IV is overrated and has some dull moments, checkpointing could have been a lot better etc, but claiming that is it shit just silly.

^^ Agreed

And so is calling SSB and Mario Kart casual bubble crap.

Thank god Need for speed underground isn't in this for once.

Great, I look forward to the next gen already, pink machines as powerful as the PSOne, and Wii this, Wii that, Nintendogs this, Cooking mama that.

/masturbates furiously

Amazing how bitter some people are about casual gaming that they'll interpret a top 5 containing only one casual game (suppose you could count GH3 as well but considering how ridiculously hard the difficulty spikes in that game I wouldn't) as the end of "proper" gaming. I think it's very encouraging that Smash Bros is a close number 2, will hopefully make Nintendo push to get more proper games out instead of the gimmicky stuff.

Good to see some decent games there in the top 5.
Having Wii Fit in there is a bit dubious though is that really a game?

Ummm, has anyone else noticed that we still have another 3.5 months of 2008 still left to go? Surely the best time to release the figures for the biggest selling game of 2008 would be in January 2009?

Or has some smart arse from Whitehall decided to change the first month of the year to August?

@Skinme: They're going to publish this list over the five best-selling titles worldwide every month, based on sales for the whole year up to that month.

Personally I find the whole thing a bit pointless.

"GTA 4 also got a perfect score from quite a few professional reviews, and it has a metascore of 98. That is the highest metascoreever for a game."


Define "professional reviews", there's no such thing. Its just an opinion from someone who's played the game for a short while (in case of some websites 10 minutes).

For example:

"I agree that GTA IV is overrated and has some dull moments,"

So therefor you agree that these "professional reviewers" were wrong?


Besides i didnt say it was shit.. i said it was shit in COMPARISION to the other gta games..

@ Smelly: you said several things, among them: "Fuck all those fucking casual gamers who buy shit like GTA4. " and "it's the casual gamers who buy games purely on the marketing/violence/media attention who buy stuff like wii fit and gta 4."

I pointed out that GTA didn't merely have media attention of the usual kind (murders inspired by GTA, GTA corrupting or young and all that), it also got rave reviews. And it is a sequel to one of the best selling and most loved game series ever. I don't think GTA IV is shit, although I agree it is overrated (and I did actually finish it, but I was all GTA'ed out after one ending, so my opinion of the game is based on seeing about 65 percent of the content, then).

My point is: what are suffenct grounds for purchasing a game, then, if positive past experiences and reviews from well established and respected media (like eurogamer) is too weak? In fact, all of the top five games got very good reviews.

If your point is that "brand value" has become more important than actual gameplay quality, then I agree - it is a negative development with all these sequels and big-name (often movie tie-in titles) are shoveled onto ill-informed consumers, while great one-off games like Okami and Bioshock remain neglected. But I don't know how to turn that tide, especially if game reviews are a part of the problem as you seem to imply?

Maybe we could find a really trustworthy gaming site and support that in whatever way we can? A little effort is better than no effort. I concider Eurogamer one of the more reliable sites out there (but again, I think they are a little probe to hype-whoring tiltles like GTA) - are there any better ones?

No unfortunately.

And as for the first comment you quoted.. that was merely an answer to the fanboys.

I do however consider a game like smash bros to be much more "hard core" and gta to me a much more "casual friendly" title..

If you take their definitions literally...

This data is crap it doesn't include this little backwater place on earth known as continental Europe.

@michaelius: If you include europe there will be loads of shitty games that only chavs like.. so they dont count

But these figures already include the UK!