Capcom announced on Wednesday that Resident Evil Requiem has sold 5 million copies in the five days since its release. The game’s very strong launch weekend makes Requiem the fastest-selling Resident Evil game of all time (although Capcom didn’t specify this record in its news release).
It’s certainly pacing far ahead of the best-selling Resident Evil games, all of which come after the series’ renaissance in the late 2010s. The 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2, the series’ all-time top seller with 16.8 million copies, sold 3 million copies in its first week. Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, Resident Evil Village, and the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 all had similar openings.
The previous fastest-selling game in the series was likely 2012’s unloved Resident Evil 6. At the time, Capcom announced that it had shipped 4.5 million copies of the game on launch, the series’ largest shipment ever — although shipments don’t necessarily equate to sales. (One benefit of the move to digital as well as physical game sales is that game companies are forced to report actual sales, rather than this hazy metric.)
Requiem‘s record-breaking opening was enabled by Capcom releasing it on four formats; it has a day-one Nintendo Switch 2 version as well as PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X editions. It’s visibly a huge hit on Steam, where it racked up an impressive peak of 344,124 concurrent players over the weekend, just inside the all-time top 40 on the platform.
How come Requiem is outperforming all the other recent Resident Evil games? At a guess, it’s because it unites the recognizable star (Leon S. Kennedy) and familiar gameplay style of the classic game remakes with the novelty and all-new story of 7 and Village. It seems Capcom, which has been on a decade-long hot streak at this point, has done it again.
