League of Legends

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Forget copies sold, this is about cold hard cash. The games that turned pixels into fortunes, ranked by estimated lifetime gross revenue. Fair warning, free-to-play and arcade earnings are notoriously hard to pin down, so these figures are the best widely-reported public estimates rather than audited accounts, and the order near the top is genuinely up for debate. What is not up for debate is the scale. From a Korean brawler that out-earned Hollywood blockbusters to the mobile match-three game funding itself off your nan, here are the biggest money machines gaming has ever built.

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These are the games that did not just sell, they changed everything that came after. The genre originators, the technical leaps, the cultural earthquakes. From a bat-and-ball in 1972 to the battle royale that swallowed pop culture, every game here moved the entire medium forward and left the rulebook a little different. Listed in order of release so you can trace the whole story, from the arcade to the open world to the online universe. This is not a best-of list, it is a how-we-got-here list. Required reading for anyone who loves games.