The Total War series has been with us for a long, long time now. The very first title of the franchise, Shogun: Total War, was released almost 20 years ago, and over the last two decades, we've had the opportunity to play no less than 13 mainline titles in the series.
It's a bit of a given that the Total War series has, then, moved a fair bit of copies between all these releases, which would be a major boon for Sega, the publisher. In fact, the combined Total War releases have sold an impressive 22 million copies, which makes for Sega's third most profitable IP.
This information has recently been shared in Sega's annual integrated report for 2018, which offers us lots of interesting data about what brings in the moolah for the famous publishing company.
Now, it is only to be expected that the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise would hold the top spot here, with approximately 800 million sold units under its belt since 1991. More surprising is the second spot, which belongs to Puyo Puyo, a relatively obscure tile-moving game, with 27 million copies moved.
Third comes our beloved Total War, while the fourth place goes to Football Manager with approximately 18 million copies sold all-in-all. This pretty curious report goes to show just how successful the originally scrappy real-time strategy series has become, and one can only hope that it continues to thrive.
