Even with its ups and downs over the years, the people still love Resident Evil. Capcom announced via a press release that the Resident Evil series sales have reached a tremendous milestone of 100 million. But this isn’t just a big development for Resident Evil. It’s also the very first series under the Capcom banner to reach that number. [Thanks, Wario64!]
Capcom attributed this number to a few distinct factors, which totally make sense if you’ve been paying attention to Resident Evil over the years. One of the biggest is Resident Evil‘s international popularity, which has remained consistent over the years since the series appeared in 1995. As noted in the release, over 80% of those 100 million sales came from outside of Japan. The Hollywood blockbuster movie series doing as well as it did might have helped boost this percentage.
Next, as a company Capcom has really embraced the digital video game marketplace, and it has released and re-released many of its classic games on various platforms. Despite being divisive among fans, Resident Evil 5 and 6 have still continued to move across platforms and do well. Remasters of the older games have also moved along generational lines, and some recently even landed on the Nintendo Switch.
Finally, it’s clear that Resident Evil is powerful enough of a brand that new entries continue to perform well, with Resident Evil 7 being a recent example moving over 7 million copies on its own. The remakes, which have also been critical successes, have made big impacts too (especially Resident Evil 2).
This number is only going to keep growing, as during the June 2020 PlayStation 5 presentation Resident Evil Village, the eighth core entry, was announced. It builds off the last game’s story almost directly, so the long-term fans who have been chasing these threads for over 20 years still have a reason to keep it up.
Resident Evil Village is slated for 2021, for the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series X, and the PC.
