Best-selling wrestling franchise

There have been well over 50 videogames based on the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) brand and and its predecessor brand WWF, but it’s the SmackDown! series (which itself has gone by several different names: WWF SmackDown!, WWE SmackDown!, and more recently WWE and WWE 2K) that has been the overwhelming success, selling 58.8 million copies, as of 23 January 2015, according to VGChartz. The Main WWE/WWF videogame series had the SmackDown! name in it until 2012, when they simplified the naming convention of what had become their one annual game to WWE plus the year. That formulation changed when the publisher 2K took over the WWE videogame license in 2014, when the name changed to 2K plus the last two digits of the year.