Resident Evil 7 Tops 5.1 Million Units Sold, 3rd Best Selling RE of All Time

Now THAT is a warm family welcome.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard recently won an award for best VR audio at the 2018 G.A.N.G. awards (that’s the Games Audio Network Guild), and rightfully so. The game had fantastic sound design to begin with, but playing with headphones in VR was an outta the park experience. Capcom released a glowing statement on their Investor Relations website about how proud they were to have won the award, listing all of the hard work that went into the sound design as well as musical score (even detailing something called the Resident Evil Music Module), but smack dab in the opening paragraph was some news that took me by surprise.

Apparently in the time between this past February and now, Resident Evil 7 has gone on to sell past the 5 million units mark – Capcom now reports that it has sold 5.1 million units, an absolutely stunning achievement. This not only places RE7 as the fourth highest selling original release of all time for Capcom, it’s also now the 3rd best selling original release of a Resident Evil game ever. It has now toppled Resident Evil 2‘s original release on PS1 (which sold 4.96 million units), leaving it to trail behind only Resident Evil 6 (7.1 million units) and Resident Evil 5 (7.3 million units) in terms of RE games, and Street Fighter 2 on SNES (6.3 million units) in terms of Capcom games as a whole.

This is a simply awesome achievement for what’s arguably the riskiest venture in RE‘s history since RE4‘s full model change back in 2005. Obviously, these sales numbers are still probably dwarfed by other games re-release sales, Resident Evil 2 for instance has sold well, well over the 4.96 million it did on PS1 by adding up the number of times it’s been ported and re-released over the twenty years since it’s launch in 1998. That doesn’t change how impressive this is though, not to mention the fact that, at 5.1 million units, RE7 has surpassed the halfway point for Capcom’s predictions of lifetime sales. Back in May of last year, Capcom made some pretty bold claims that it expected RE7 to sell at least 10 million units in its lifetime. At the time, RE7 had only sold a little over 3.5 million, and the statement seemed more “sure, after it’s been ported to a million things like all the other games”. Now… not so much.

Applesauce all around for Capcom and the success of RE7, in our opinion it is easily the most well deserved sales the series has had in years.

[Source]