Gamers have had a ton of new releases to play this year, like Split Fiction and Avowed, and that’s on top of all the great games 2024 offered that people are still buying and playing. Now that the first quarter of 2025 has passed, market research company Circana released sales rankings, showing which games are coming out on top so far this year. Executive Director, Games, Mat Piscatella of Circana took to Bluesky recently to break down 2025 video game sales, and the top-selling games shouldn’t be a shocker.
Monster Hunter: Wilds Leads the Way
Capcom’s Monster Hunter: Wilds is 2025’s best-selling game so far. It has sold over 10 million copies, including 8 million within its first three days on sale. Wilds is the first mainline Monster Hunter title in seven years and clearly resonated with audiences. Critics agreed too as Monster Hunter: Wilds holds an 88 or higher metascore on Metacritic across PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC reviews.
Rounding out the top five were Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Plaion’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Sony’s MLB: The Show 25, and Microsoft’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Assassin’s Creed Shadows and MLB: The Show 25 released days apart in March and were easily the best-selling games of March 2025. That they were also the second- and third-best-selling games year-to-date shows just how popular they are with gamers.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows, in finally delivering what players have wanted by taking the series to Feudal Japan, stands out as a resounding success across all entries in the franchise. According to Piscatella on Bluesky, it had the third-best launch month in U.S. dollar sales for the Assassin’s Creed franchise, behind only Assassin’s Creed III and Valhalla.
Other Takeaways From 2025’s Video Game Sales Figures
Despite the abundance of great new games to release this year, the list of best-selling games is unsurprisingly packed with titles from last year, or even earlier. NBA 2K25 (#8), Madden NFL 25 (#13), EA Sports FC (#14), and EA Sports College Football 25 (#17) all show just how well sports games sell even when their sports’ seasons are over or nearing completion. These titles have also received massive discounts recently, both physically and digitally, as their publishers gear up for the launch of their next entries.2025 releases WWE 2K25 (#6) and PGA Tour 2K25 (#9) have also had very strong starts to their launches.
Minecraft coming in as the twelfth-ranked best-selling game should come as no surprise–especially with the release of its film adaptation this month–you might not have realized the legs some other titles have. Grand Theft Auto V is the eleventh-best-selling game of 2025 so far, even as the industry eagerly and anxiously awaits its next entry. GTA V first released in 2013 and has generated more than $8.5 billion in revenue, as of December 2023. Similarly, Red Dead Redemption II released in 2018 and is still selling well, ranking fifteenth for 2025 so far.
Other notable titles include Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (#16), Hogwarts Legacy (#18), and Elden Ring (#19), all released in either 2022 or 2023. Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erd Tree expansion in 2024 certainly helped give it a boost, and a spinoff multiplayer game in Elden Ring Nightrein is on its way next month. Elden Ring will also be coming to the Nintendo Switch 2 this year, which will only elevate its sales even further.
The rankings in Circana’s report reflect U.S. dollar sales of physical and digital games (from storefronts that share digital sales information). Sales recorded from January 5 through April 5, 2025, were reflected in the rankings.
