Hvorfor Resident Evil 4 er den bestselgende nyinnspillingen av denne konsollgenerasjonen

The 2023 Resident Evil 4 remake is the best-selling remake of the current console generation, and it isn't close. New estimates from analytics firm Alinea put it at 16.8 million copies sold across PlayStation, Steam, and Xbox since the PS5 and Xbox Series launched in November 2020, with nearly 4 million of those moving this year alone.

The platform split tells its own story. PlayStation leads at 7.4 million copies, Steam sits close behind at 6.8 million, and Xbox trails at 1.6 million. On revenue, Alinea estimates the remake has grossed about $560 million for Capcom, weighted 53.1 percent to PlayStation, 34.1 percent to Steam, and 12.8 percent to Xbox. Steam pulls in less money per copy because so many sales happen in lower-priced regions and during deep seasonal discounts, which is why China, Brazil, and Russia all rank among its top five territories. That discounting also feeds a long tail: Steam made up 28 percent of launch-week revenue but 34.1 percent of the lifetime total today, a game earning a bigger slice of its money years after release.

Resident Evil 4 was close to the perfect remake candidate. The 2005 original lands on nearly every "greatest games ever" list and reshaped third-person action design, so demand was never in doubt. It was also three console generations old and visually dated, old enough that a rebuild felt new rather than redundant. Capcom had proven it could do this too, since the 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake showed the studio understood how to modernize a classic without gutting it. Alinea sums up the shared trait behind these hits neatly: they are "adored, aged, and available everywhere."

Ark: Survival Ascended, the 2023 rebuild of Ark: Survival Evolved, sits at 7 million copies, boosted further by PlayStation Plus and Game Pass inclusions that pushed total players past 13 million. The Last of Us Part 1 follows at 6.3 million, split between PS5 and its first-ever PC release, notable given reports that Sony is easing off day-and-date single-player PC ports to protect margins. Bethesda's shadow-dropped Oblivion Remastered has moved 4.5 million paid copies on top of the millions who played it through Game Pass, a run that bodes well for the just-announced Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters. The Dead Space remake rounds out the top five at 4.3 million. Further down, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has sold 4.2 million, and Konami's Silent Hill 2 remake has reached 3.2 million and $170 million gross, a comeback that arguably did more for the brand than a decade of stalled projects. For a sense of how fast this category moves, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced already cleared 3.5 million copies in its first two weeks.

Step back and the more interesting question is why remakes went from occasional nostalgia plays to a pillar of nearly every big publisher's plan. Alinea frames it as a direct response to the AAA market's mess. A pandemic sales boom got mistaken for a permanent new baseline, so studios staffed up and budgets ballooned, and then interest rates rose, the cost-of-living crisis hit, and the growth evaporated. That left an industry with a bloated cost base under pressure to earn it back, reaching for the two blunt levers of layoffs and higher prices, the $80 tags and day-one DLC included. When a game costs upward of $150 million and most of a decade to make, the people guarding those budgets get risk-averse by necessity.

A brand-new IP is a six-to-eight-year gamble with no guaranteed audience, while a high-fidelity remake comes with a proven design, a built-in fanbase, and a shorter, cheaper production cycle. The smartest version of the strategy, which Alinea credits to Capcom, uses that reliable remake income to fund the riskier swings, the way steady Resident Evil rebuilds helped make an oddball like Pragmata possible. The catch is that the model only works for a lean operation; run remakes through the same over-staffed machine that caused the problem and the efficiency advantage disappears.

The series sold more than 23 million copies between March 2025 and March 2026, and this year's Resident Evil Requiem became one of the best-selling games of 2026 as well as the fastest-selling entry in the franchise's history. Producer Masachika Kawata has confirmed a plan to release a new game every year, alternating fresh entries with remakes so the schedule doesn't burn out. As he put it, "Remakes are just as important as the mainline titles." The pipeline is already visible: the Resident Evil Code: Veronica Remake revealed at Summer Game Fest is due in 2027, and insiders expect Veronica and a rumored Zero remake to be related to Requiem, largely because they were built alongside it rather than as part of some master plan.

The RE4 remake also shows the other half of the value: keeping an IP warm between mainline games. More than a year on, it is still generating headlines and fan work, from a fan-made co-op multiplayer mod that drops a second player into Leon's campaign, to the resurfaced detail that Capcom once planned to let you begin as Ashley Graham in a cut stealth prologue called Chapter 0, to a stunning cosplay that periodically pulls the game back into everyone's feeds. That steady, low-cost cultural presence is exactly what a publisher wants from a catalogue title, and it is a big part of why the remake keeps selling long after launch. The same logic explains Square Enix finally taking Final Fantasy 7 multiplatform, with the trilogy finale Revelation set to launch on PS5, Xbox, PC, and Switch 2 at once rather than behind another long exclusivity window.

That is good news for anyone with a nostalgic favorite still waiting its turn, and a reminder that the safest bet on the board is usually the one everyone rushes to copy.