Last year was one of the greatest for video games. Indies took the fold, uprooted AAA, and beat massive budgets by a passion for art alone. But that doesn’t mean sales figures reflect that in full, as the average Joe just doesn’t care about our petty squabbles. And Circana’s new charts prove that.
Mat Piscatella, Senior Director of the market research company Circana, shared new charts that show total sales numbers in 2025. As somewhat expected, Battlefield 6 reigns supreme, topping the chart by a wide margin and beating its primary competitor by a good few spots. It’s a major comeback for the series, which has been down on its luck for years following the horrific launch of 2042 that, instead of refining a formula, tried to reinvent it.
That isn’t to say that CoD didn’t perform. It still has a couple of horses in the race, both being Black Ops titles, i.e., 6 and 7, respectively. The newer one sits at the number five spot, but the older isn’t too far behind at number 10, still actively in the inner circle of gaming’s biggest titles.
What surprised me the most is the lack of non-sequels or non-AAA titles, despite the fact that last year was chock-full of such games, including Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (recently crowned the most-awarded game of all time, above even Elden Ring).
What’s more, there are a lot of old games in there, too. Grand Theft Auto V still holds, even if by a thread, to the top 20 category, and it even rose slightly over last month. Minecraft is number 13, still outselling most of the gaming industry and upgrading its meteoric sales number, while Bethesda’s soft remaster of Oblivion cracked the top 10 with relative ease.
I will say that seeing Split Fiction (bolstered not only by its quality but also its nature as a co-op title, which tracks with most of the games on the chart being multiplayer) inspires hope. It was one of the best games I had ever played, and even if not on the same level as It Takes Two, it showed me that innovation and rich ideas are still alive and well in gaming.
It’s going to take a long time to kick out yearly rehashes from charts like these, if that ever even happens.
Indies are obviously on the rise and will continue to take more and more of the market share for themselves, and if they continue at the pace set in 2025, then perhaps there’ll be more of them in Circana’s 2026 best-seller chart.
The post Surprise-filled 2025 sales chart shows Battlefield 6 on top, CoD in the doldrums, and that we still can’t stop buying classic games appeared first on Destructoid.
