It doesn’t look good.

Using NPD data, Forbes released a list of the top ten bestselling video games in the United States from the last 15 years. Here’s the list and unit sales, synthesized by GameDaily.

1. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) – 9.43 million
2. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (2007) – 8.2 million
3. Madden NFL 07 (2006) – 7.7 million
4. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) – 7.3 million
5. Madden NFL 06 (2005) – 6.65 million
6. Halo 2 (2004) – 6.6 million
7. Madden NFL 08 (2007) – 6.56 million
8. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) – 6.25 million
9. Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001) – 6.2 million
10. Madden NFL 2005 (2004) – 6.1 million

Joystiq points out that if you combine the unit sales for Pokemon: Red and Blue, that game tops the chart with 9.9 million.

What can we learn from this list?

The most obvious observation is that video games are on the rise. Although Forbes looked at games from 1993 onward, most of the titles that made the list came out in the last four years and all ten came out after 2001. Also, if you count ports, every game here is cross-platform.

If you compare these sales rankings with the critical receptions of these games — using Metacritic to gauge critical opinion — it’s clear that scores don’t make or break a game.

The Grand Theft Auto games and Halo 2 all have scores hovering around that perfect 95, but Guitar Hero III and three of the four Madden NFL titles have scores in the 80s. Ironically, the Madden game with the highest score is the one at the bottom of the list.

Critical reception is unimportant. What all these games did have was the financial backing and marketing resources of prominent publishers like EA, Activision, Microsoft, and Take-Two. These companies and their consumers by and large like casual games (Pokemon, Guitar Hero), franchises (all ten titles), and big-budget action-fests backed up by massive marketing campaigns (GTA, Halo 2).

Does this trend stand to continue? I don’t think so.

The critical and financial success of games like BioShock and Portal suggests that there is a marketable place for story-driven, creative games among all the blazing franchises. Those are the kind of games I wish we saw on this list, and, in the next decade, I hope we will.