Racing games were very popular on PlayStation in 2021

PlayStation has revealed its best-selling digital games across PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 for 2021 – and racing games prominently feature throughout the list.

Based upon PlayStation Store sales across the last 12 months, and split across US/Canada and Europe, plus PS4 and PS5, there are some very intriguing results.

On Sony’s latest flagship console, F1 2021 was the 11th best-selling game of the year in Europe. Not 11th-best-selling sports game, or driving game, but 11th overall. That’s ahead of Resident Evil Village, NBA 2K22, tentpole PS5 exclusive Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and the acclaimed DEATHLOOP.

These sales results, on PS5 at least, show that this particular game series is still nailing its brief. If playing an F1 game gets someone into the genre, that’s only a good thing for the sim racing community.

Meanwhile, also in Europe, the sixth best-selling PS4 game of 2021 game was quite the surprise. We’ll give you a clue. It’s an open-world car RPG that launched way back in 2018. Fancy a guess?

Yup, Ubisoft Ivory Tower’s The Crew 2. We’ve seen a surprising amount of interest for articles related to the US-set driving title this year, and this sale chart result goes a long way to explain why. That’s ahead of the latest Call of Duty: Vanguard, for reference. Wild.

GT Sport also makes an appearance, number 12 in the European chart and another surprise performance for a game that was originally released over three years ago. Now it’s an old stager, it can be regularly picked up at a discounted rate.

In February 2021, we reported that it had reached 9.5 million users, after a strong year of digital sales, it’s most likely exceeded the 10 million mark by now.

Another open-world arcade racer still selling by the bucketload is Need for Speed Heat, despite it being part of the EA Play subscription service. 14th in the European charts, 15th in the US/Canada.

While the list features plenty of soccer, North American sports and first-person shooters, having several racing games – even if some are old by now – in the mix just goes to show how relevant the racing game genre remains and possibly why so many are set to release in 2022. We’ll be here for every single one of them.

Source: PlayStation Blog