Resident Evil 2 becomes the series' best-selling game

Capcom announced this morning that Resident Evil Requiem continues its success and is selling very well, having surpassed eight million copies sold to date. Impressive, but it still has a long way to go compared to the series' true giants.

For 17 long years, it has been known the somewhat uneven Resident Evil 5 was the series' best-selling game, with 19 million copies sold. But Capcom's latest quarterly report now reveals a historic shift. For the first time in 17 years, Resident Evil 5 is no longer the best-selling game, as instead the honour belongs to the remake of Resident Evil 2.

Although Capcom has not commented on the figures, a well-known Capcom insider has analysed the results and writes on Resetera:

"RE:2 sits at 19.75 million presently. RE5 last quarter was sitting at 19.01 million. It didn't place on the top sellers chart, but it's presumably a bit behind RE6 in sales last quarter. But even being gracious and presuming it sold just as much as RE6 and not less than it (710,000 units), it wouldn't be enough to surpass RE:2 now (RE:2 at 19.75m, RE5 would be at 19.72m at maximum).

"So officially RE:2 is the top selling Resident Evil game of all time now, beating the long champion RE5 before it."

Resident Evil 2 was released in 2019 and has thus, in just seven years, managed to knock Resident Evil 5, which debuted in 2009, off the top spot.

As a side note, another exciting detail is worth mentioning: the Resident Evil series as a whole has now surpassed another Japanese and significantly older giant... Final Fantasy. Square Enix's role-playing game series has currently sold 212 million copies, while Resident Evil can now boast 213 million copies. This makes it the best-selling Japanese game series not from Nintendo (Mario and Pokémon aren't going anywhere anytime soon).