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According to Wikipedia, Tetris by Electronic Arts is the best selling video game ever made.

With 100 million downloads, it sold 17.46 million copies more than the next best selling game, Wii Sports on the Nintendo Wii, which sold 82.54 million copies.

There is also a news article that raises the sale count to 425 million copies, which would mean that Tetris sold five times more copies than the next best selling video game.

The Android store only shows 10 million downloads, and my question is simply whether the claim of 100 million sales is plausible because Android is the most popular mobile platform, and so would logically account for the majority of the sales.

There are clearly other factors to consider, such as sales of Tetris variants with different "power ups", as well as all the other mobile platforms that it was released on. However, if the claim is real, then these extra versions must make up the missing 90% of the 100 million sales.

Tetris on the Google Play Store

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    "Android is the most popular mobile platform, and so would logically account for the majority of the sales" This is a questionable conclusion. IIRC there are reports that indicate many Android devices are basically replacements for feature phones, mostly used for texts/phone calls (certainly not all, but I wouldn't be surprised if this applied to most near the lower end of the feature/price range).
    – Daniel Beck
    Commented Mar 13, 2015 at 10:18

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+100

According to a different Wikipedia page, the one for this very game, the initial release was September 12, 2006 for the iOS, with an Android release only coming out in September 1, 2011, almost a full five years later.

Which such a large difference in release dates, iOS would make up the majority of downloads for this app, not Android.

This couples with the fact that there were two separate events where the app was removed from the App Store and Google Play, though they were fairly close together and shortly after the Android release, so they aren't as likely to have had as much of an impact as the release dates.

Moreover, the 100 million downloads report was made on Jan 21, 2010 according to the reference linked to that claim. While this doesn't prove that the 100 million sales statistic is accurate, it proves that the 10 million Android downloads are irrelevant to this claim, because this claim was made prior to any Android release.

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  • @georgechalhoub It's an entirely different article - specifically the one for the game itself, rather than the one OP linked.
    – Zibbobz
    Commented Mar 9, 2015 at 18:07
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    @georgechalhoub True, but it does prove that his chief argument, that the 10 million Androids downloads are startlingly low, is irrelevant to the 100 million reported Prior to the Android release.
    – Zibbobz
    Commented Mar 9, 2015 at 18:21
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    @Zibbobz It would be irrelevant even if it was released prior to 2010. The 10M+ shown for Android is for the free version, and the 100M from the article is "100 Million paid mobile downloads". The entire Android argument is a red herring from start to finish.
    – Is Begot
    Commented Mar 9, 2015 at 18:34
  • Note the ipod is not ios
    – mmmmmm
    Commented May 16, 2020 at 11:15

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