With any creative medium, you'll find the bigger and more successful a given property becomes, the more those at the top attempt to revisit the drawing board to find out what 'bankable qualities' can be used over and over again. In video games it's why Call of Duty didn't see a shakeup to its core mechanics until Advanced Warfare's mid-air boosters, why Assassin's Creed went seven entire years and remained steadfast in the face of something like Shadow of Mordor proving the formula could be done better, and why Far Cry Primal elected to play it safe for its most recent release. Formulas sell, and when done well, you'll barely even notice. After all, was anyone crying about Vice City and San Andreas using GTA III's game engine? Hell no. Now, the real question is whether that's a good thing. Is it enough for a given developer to release 'yet another' of something that initially worked? What constitutes a true sequel in an age of patches and DLC packs, and how much are we prepared to pay? The global games industry is worth around 90 billion dollars at time of writing, so every investment made and every idea pitched in the upper echelons of financial viability has to be rock solid. That said, I've totalled up the gross sales of the 15 highest-selling games from 2010 to February 2016, which I'll then rank from worst to best. Does following a business mentality over the years get us the best games? Let's find out... Note: Metacritic was avoided due to score differences between platforms, and all figures are in millions of units per game, so '20' means twenty million copies of a given game were sold, regardless of retail, digital or price point over time. (Thanks to VGChartz for all the data).
15. Kinect Adventures! (2010, X360) - 21.76 Million
We all tend to think of everything relating to Microsoft's godawful motion-tracking device as an out and out failure; something that didn't gain traction with critics nor consumers. However, where the hardware completely failed, the software caught on in a big way, as the Wii Sports-aping Kinect Adventures! has some of the highest-selling figures this side of GTA V, which to do so off the back of one platform - being a 360 exclusive - is pretty insane. Somehow, watching Microsoft try to double-down on these figures through their initial pitch for the Kinect-infused Xbox One doesn't look quite so insane any more.
