Need for Speed series sells 100m copies, earns $2.7b life-to-date

Yep, EA has announced the Need for Speed series has raced past the 100 million sold mark -- thanks to recent sales of Need for Speed: Shift -- and earned $2.7 billion in life-to-date sales, cementing its status as the best-selling racing brand in gaming. Just because it's sold the most doesn't necessarily mean it's the best franchise in terms of quality, however -- so we cooked up the graph you see above!

There are a couple of things to keep in mind as you follow the red line's progress:

• First of all, we didn't include cell phone entries and tried to focus on the main entries in the franchise

• The general quality of the series seems to be high, yet starts to dip after the release of Underground 2 in 2004; Shift seems to have brought the series back from the brink of critical mediocrity

EA's focus now is on rebooting the franchise -- the first step was to release a new hardcore sim racer in Need for Speed: Shift. The next move is to release Need for Speed Nitro, an arcade racer for the Wii and DS market, and follow that with Need for Speed World Online, a free-to-play PC racer for the casual audience.