Hollywood Records decided not to release Greatest Hits II to the US market, but instead created their own collection, Classic Queen (1992), peaking at number four on the Billboard 200 chart.

The album continued to sell well throughout the 1980s, appearing on several UK year-end charts, and by the end of the decade it had become the fourth-biggest selling album in the UK during the 1980s, with sales of over 1. For the 1981 release, the photo was skewed, but was later presented as it was originally taken for the 2011 re-release. Greatest Hits peaked at number eight on the Billboard 200 in November 2020, the second-slowest ascent to the top ten of the US album chart in history. It reached number one on the UK Albums Chart, spending four weeks at the top and sold consistently well throughout the 1980s, becoming the fourth-biggest selling album of the decade.

Later that year, Hollywood Records released a companion collection, Greatest Hits, with similar artwork (on a red background, where Classic Queen was on royal blue). Speculation was rising about the state of Freddie's health, which was being reported on an almost daily basis. The 17 tracks were universal, with no territorial variations as with the first Greatest Hits compilation. It has also been certified 15× platinum in Australia, 10× platinum in New Zealand, and 3× platinum in Canada.

Commonly referred to as the Red Greatest Hits, it features most of the '70s tracks absent from Classic Queen (including " Another One Bites the Dust", "We Will Rock You", "We Are the Champions" and " Killer Queen"). In NME Barney Hoskyns said, "All of [their songs], besides 'Another One Bites the Dust', are quite repulsive, unbelievably crass insults to their respective genres and uniformly vulgar music. This the first is a series of full length releases celebrating Queen's 40th Anniversary, is a must have for any Queen fan, chock-full of 17 hits. Although Greatest Flix only listed 17 videos on its sleeve, it contained two videos for "We Will Rock You". Top of the Music FIMI/GfK 2019: Un anno con la musica Italiana" (Download the attachment and open the Album file) (in Italian).It reached a new peak of number 11 on the Billboard 200 chart on its reissue in 1992, [22] and finally made the top ten of the Billboard 200 in November 2020 when it peaked at number eight, as a result of a Walmart sale on various vinyl albums on 14 November 2020. This album touches all of Queen's compelling sides, from the effortless pop of "I Want to Break Free" to the symphonic grandeur of the epic "Innuendo," this release captures the band at their most far reaching, creatively.

Roger Taylor had not written any songs that had been released as singles for the band at that point. Fourteen in total, from “A Kind Of Magic” (Highlander Soundtrack) to “The Show Must Go On”, “Under Pressure” (with David Bowie) to “Innuendo” (the last big hit), brought Mercury, May, Deacon and Taylor into the very closed circle of sacred rock monsters.The US ended up with its original edit of Queen's first single release, " Keep Yourself Alive", originally released in 1973 and re-released in the US in 1975, following the success of " Bohemian Rhapsody". Most of the videos are now available on the DVD Greatest Video Hits 2 with the exception of the videos from the 1991 Innuendo album. I don’t mind some surface noise from an old weathered vinyl, but a new one is a little annoying even after cleaning multiple times. Following the release of the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018, it re-entered the charts worldwide. It is the seventh best-selling album in Germany, [5] the thirteenth best-selling album in France, [6] and the best-selling album by a foreign artist in Finland.