Sure you still have big sellers on the PC, but that’s not really the issue. Consider that Half-Life 2 was the sequel to one of the biggest PC shooters of all time, and sold somewhere around 2 million copies. Halo 2 was in the same situation on the XBox and sold 5 million copies. A developer would be stupid to ignore those kinds of numbers.
I think Charles’ statement should be ammended to “The PC will be the domain of indy games and console ports.”
Are you two related?
Perhaps if Valve didn’t use STEAM the sales would be higher, perhaps.
Perhaps if Valve didn’t use STEAM the sales would be higher, perhaps.[/quote]
You won’t admit you love Steam and so
how are you ever to know?
For every Halo 2, there’s a World of Warcraft, whose profit numbers probably dwarf those of Halo 2’s.
Actually, there isn’t. There’s only one World of Warcraft, but there are a number of console games that have sold 5 million copies.
In the last two years or so? And you’re bunching all console platforms together? If we’re gonna be that cheesy, let’s just say that WoW sells ~5 million every three or four months… 8)
Do you even have a point anymore? I was trying to draw as direct a comparison as possible between two similar games released around the same time. WoW, conversely, is in a completely different genre with a different pricing model.
WoW, interestingly enough, has about 2 million current subscribers, and who knows how many total “sales.” The fact that they can milk those subscribers for far more than the price of a regular game is completely immaterial to the discussion.
Perhaps if Valve didn’t use STEAM the sales would be higher, perhaps.[/quote]
Do those numbers even include the # of copies sold over Steam? I know a lot of people bought it through Steam just because of the Gold version that wasn’t available in stores (I know I did).
As far as I know Valve has never released any sales numbers for Steam, and they’re the only ones who’d know. The number I saw was 1.4 million retail, so I rounded up. It’s quite possible they didn’t sell 600,000 copies via Steam.
The subject was “PC gaming is domed yet again!”, not “One shooter on X-Box outsells all shooters on PC.” It would be interesting if we tallied total sales of the top five shooters over the past two years for the PC versus the consoles. More to the point, if we’re talking about the overall financial potency of different platforms versus one another, we certainly don’t have to do comparisons on a genre to genre basis. Each platform has its strengths in different areas, as I’m quite sure you know.
It was at 4.5 million and climbing a few months back, do tell what happened. I find it hard to believe that it crashed that hard.
Go and reread the title of this thread please.
NPD numbers are wildly unreliable - but comparable (kinda).
But all NPD numbers are lower, much lower than the actual sales. Part of that is worldwide sales, part of that is they don’t track some retailers in the areas where they do track, and then of course sales through online systems.
As for Halo, name another FPS that had the much money thrown at it for its launch. I heard numbers like $40million in advertising for the launch. It damn well better have sold well.
And as for developers looking at the numbers and comparing them. The return for PC games per unit is still much higher than for consoles. George B actually has some good rants about this back on planetcrap. But yet devs keep chasing the megahit on consoles. Part of this seems to be this is what publishers will fund. PC gaming scares publishers, I guess for a variety of reasons, incompatibility, piracy, pc power, etc.
Chet
I know I’m rubbing it in a bit here, but Blizzard recently announced that that they have surpassed the 5 million mark in subscribers.
If it has that many subscribers, I wonder how many boxes they actually sold.
Jayeeesus that’s a lot. I remember reading about EQ a few years ago and how they boasted having 500,000 subscribers, but man, WoW at 5 million is phenomenal.
It’s even crazier if you think about the $50,000,000 per MONTH or more that it’s bringing in.
Is that 5 million active subscribers or does that include people like me who quit and haven’t paid for the better part of a year now?
It’s even crazier if you think about the $50,000,000 per MONTH or more that it’s bringing in.[/quote]
Really just thinking about that makes my head spin. I would love to see their books I bet its amazing shit.
What do you think the outlay each month is? I would say at least 15 million if not a bit higher.
Someone should have snapped up VU Games back when VU was shopping them. Why didn’t Microsoft just toss down a billion or two and buy them? Not only is Blizzard one of the few huge PC game success stories, which means they are a Windows game success story, but doing a WoW port exclusive to the Xbox would have been a huge boost.
And then there’s Diablo and Starcraft exclusively on the Xbox in single player and MMO forms.
What do you think the outlay each month is? I would say at least 15 million if not a bit higher.
A couple of months ago I heard they had 500 CS people working on the game. It’s probably more now. Then you have artists, programmers, PR, management, etc.