Resident Evil 7 Hits 4 Million Sales, Finally

There aren’t many people who would call Resident Evil 7 a critical failure. After all, it brought some much-needed innovation to the long-stagnating series, reset the lore so that people could actually enjoy it without spending three hours on Wikipedia catching up on the plot, and most important of all, it actually made the damn game scary again. You know, the one thing you sign up for when you decide to get a horror game.

Indeed, almost everyone agrees Resident Evil 7 is good… except Capcom, the developer. When they launched the game, they had the lofty ambition of having the game sell 4 million copies by the end of March’s fiscal year, and 10 million over the lifetime of the entire game. Well, so far, it’s failed to meet that latter goal… but the former goal was matched!

Just now!

A year late!

So yeah, it should come to no surprise that while Capcom is celebrating this milestone, it’s also got a serious problem about overestimating exactly how well a game can sell in today’s market. That’s especially true for a horror game, which is already a fairly niche market that people don’t exactly flock too, even when a name as big as Resident Evil releases a new big title.

For what it’s worth, a game has a long time to reach that “lifetime” goal, and Resident Evil 7 isn’t completely done yet. Later this year they’re going to release the Gold version, which comes pre-packaged with all the DLC, and at the same time the final DLC pack, “Not a Hero," will be released to free for players, which is a nice little prize if I do say so myself.

Will it be enough to sell 6 million more copies of the game? No. Probably not. But still, 4 million is nothing to turn your nose at...