The Best Selling Sports Video Game Franchises In History

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Hey Friends,

NBA 2K23 officially comes out on September 9th, and the 24th installment of the NBA 2K video game franchise will feature four different cover athletes:

• Devin Booker (NBA 2K23: Standard Edition) 

• Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi (NBA 2K23: WNBA Edition) 

• Michael Jordan (NBA 2K23: Championship Edition and NBA 2K23: Michael Jordan Edition)

But rather than talk about one video game specifically, let’s take a look at the most successful sports video game franchises of all time. Here are the Top 5:

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FIFA — EA Sports

FIFA is the most successful sports video game franchise of all time, and that really shouldn’t be all that surprising. Because soccer (football for my non-American friends!) is the world’s most popular sport—billions of people play globally—and EA has been making the video game since 1993—38 editions have already been released!

• Copies sold: 325 million+

• Editions: 38

• First Edition: FIFA International Soccer (1993) for Sega/Genesis console

The FIFA video game is currently available in 18 different languages. EA Sports sold more than 325 million copies across 50 countries, and the series has produced $20 billion in sales over the past two decades.

Fun fact: EA Sports has seen its stock price surge more than 2,000% since the release of FIFA in 1993—compared to the S&P 500, which is up roughly 800% during the same period.

But despite being the best-selling video game franchise of all time, the partnership between EA Sports & FIFA is officially ending after FIFA 23. Why? Well, it’s complicated, but EA Sports is essentially just losing the license to the FIFA name, and the game will continue under a new name (still produced by EA sports) in 2023.

Read more about the EA Sports-FIFA breakup.

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Madden NFL — EA Sports

Madden might not be the most successful sports video game of all time (it’s second), but it’s undoubtedly one of the most influential. The story goes like this: After being turned down by Joe Montana because he had a deal with Atari, EA Sports convinced John Madden to put his name on the game and released the first edition in 1988.

• Copies sold: 130 million+

• Editions: 42 

• First edition: John Madden Football (1988) for the Commodore 64/Commodore 128, Apple II, and MS-DOS

It’s estimated that the Madden video game series has done $4 billion in sales, and EA makes about $600 million annually from the game today. But it wasn’t always smooth sailing—the first game took SEVEN YEARS of revisions before it was finally released.

Why? Because EA wanted it to be 7-on-7 football, but John Madden didn’t think that was “real football” and refused to let them use his name unless it was 11-on-11 and included actual plays from his 1980 Oakland Raiders Playbook.

That ended up being the right strategy, and EA isn’t the only one that benefitted from it financially. John Madden initially turned down stock in the company—which he later regretted because EA’s stock rose from $7.50 in 1989 to $70 in 1999—but he ended up signing a deal in 2005 for EA to license his name, image, and likeness in perpetuity for $150 million and roughly $5 million in annual endorsement fees.

Read more about John Madden’s partnership with EA.

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NBA 2K — 2K Sports

The first edition of NBA 2K was released in 1998 on Dreamcast, and it has gone on to become the third most successful video game series of all time. Sega Sports and Visual Studios initially published the game, but Take-Two Interactive acquired Visual Studios from Sega for $24 million in 2005 and has produced the game since.

• Copies sold: 123 million+

• Editions: 27 

• First edition: NBA 2K (1999) for Dreamcast

One interesting stat is that about 2.3 million people play NBA 2k daily. That seems like an abnormally large number. But given basketball’s global reach (compared to football) and the NBA 2K’s realistic gameplay features, including individual player attributes like LeBron’s pregame chalk toss, it isn’t necessarily all that surprising.

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Pro Evolution Soccer + eFootball — Konami

Alright, this one shocked me. Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) was the main competitor to EA Sports’ FIFA. They had Lionel Messi as the game’s exclusive cover athlete from 2009-2011, and it was intended to be a more realistic, slower, smoother, and more strategy-based game flow—compared to FIFA’s faster arcade-style gameplay.

But I didn’t realize they have sold more than 100 million copies over two decades.

• Copies sold: 112 million+ 

• Editions: 21 

• First edition: Pro Evolution Soccer (2001) for PlayStation 2

The game is still being produced today, and the mobile edition of eFootball has 500 million downloads since 2017. But PES has continuously lost licenses to EA Sports, and the game has struggled to match its early 2000s popularity, falling way behind FIFA in annual sales.

• 2019 FIFA copies sold: 12.2 million 

• 2019 PES copies sold: 550,000

So while EA Sports lost the FIFA license, they definitely beat Pro Evolution Soccer.

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NBA Live — EA Sports

The 5th best-selling sports video game franchise of all time is NBA Live, meaning EA Sports holds three out of the top five spots. But this one surprised me also because while the series did well from the 90s through the late 2000s, it began to fall off in the early 2010s and soon became the clear #2 to NBA 2k.

• Copies sold: 35 million

• Editions: 23 

• First edition: NBA Live 95 (1994) for MS-DOS, Genesis, and Super NES

And with EA Sports even canceling the game in 2013, 2017, and 2020, they seem unwilling to play second fiddle any longer and have put the game on indefinite hiatus while saying they are working with the NBA on developing a new gaming project.

For context: NBA Live 19 was considered a pretty good game, but the franchise sold around the same amount of games as the Nintendo Switch edition of NBA 2K19.

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Honorable Mentions

Tony Hawk’s: The Tony Hawk-Activision franchise nearly missed the list, selling over 31 million copies and generating $1.4 billion in revenue since its release. But here’s the interesting part: Activision famously tried to buy out Tony Hawk with a $500,000 payment instead of paying him royalty fees. He declined and now gets paid around $6 million per year in royalties from the video game franchise. That’s a big-time win.

WWE 2K: Is it a sports game? A sports-entertainment game? A fighting game? Either way, it has been successful, with 60 million copies sold, and WWE 2K22 was credited as a driver for WWE’s 53% increase in revenue for the company’s Q1 earnings report.

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Well, there you have it—those are the all-time best-selling sports video game franchises. I hope you guys enjoyed the breakdown, and hopefully, it was a nice jog down memory lane. Have a great weekend, and I’ll talk to everyone on Monday.

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