Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 remake launches next week, so what better time to look back on the series’ history and chart the top-performing games in the premiere survival horror franchise?
Resident Evil has long been one of gaming’s most famous franchises, and it’s still going strong almost 30 years after first unleashing its viral zombies into the world, with the hotly anticipated Resident Evil 4 remake now mere days away. Between the mainline games and many spin-offs, remakes, and re-releases, the Resident Evil series has sold well over 110 million units in total to date, but how does that number break down and which have been the top performers in Capcom’s long-running survival horror series?
To find out, we pulled sales data from the handy list of Capcom’s platinum-selling games it keeps on its corporate site, which is accurate up to the end of 2022… this could mean that a few of these are a little lower than the actual figure if there were additional versions that didn’t break a million copies sold so didn’t make the list (as appears to be the case for things like the N64 port of Resi 2), but those shouldn’t move the needle too much in most cases. With that in mind, let’s kick things off with the biggest Resi game to date… and it might come as a bit of a surprise.
Resident Evil series sales figures: Which games did best?
1. Resident Evil 5 — 13.5 million
Capcom’s data puts Resident Evil 5 as the series’ third-best performer at 8.6 million units shifted, but that doesn’t take into account either the Xbox One re-release or the Gold edition, which add almost five million more between them and bump it comfortably into the top spot. What’s wild about this is that RE5 is arguably one of the weakest mainline games in the series, but with this sequel playing even more into the action slant of Resi 4 and bringing co-op to the p