PC top game sales for May

from ActionTrip:

  1. Guild Wars Factions-NCSoft
    2. World of Warcraft-Blizzard
    3. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion-Bethesda Softworks
    4. The Sims 2- Electronic Arts
    5. Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends-Microsoft
    6. The Sims 2 Family Fun Stuff Expansion Pack-Electronic Arts
    7. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter-UbiSoft
    8. The Sims 2 Open for Business-Electronic Arts
    9. Age of Empires III-Microsoft
    10. Battlefield 2-Electronic Arts
    11. Civilization IV-Take Two Interactive
    12. Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II-Electronic Arts
    13. Star Wars: Empire at War-LucasArts
    14. Heroes of Might & Magic V-UbiSoft
    15. Call of Duty 2-Activision
    16. Guild Wars-NCSoft
    17. Warcraft III Battle Chest-Blizzard
    18. Guild Wars Factions: Collector’s Edition-NCSoft
    19. The Sims 2 Nightlife Expansion Pack-Electronic Arts
    20. The Sims Complete Collection-Electronic Arts

Ignoring the Sims…

For some reason, it surprises me that AOE3 is still on that list, and that it’s above the next 5 games (well, I guess BF2 and Civ4 are fairly old, but to be above BfME2?).

I’m surprised to see Guild Wars Factions and the base edition both on the list.

And of course WoW and Warcraft 3 are amazing… What’s gonna knock WoW out of the top 5? The Burning Crusade? And the lack of EQ2 on the list is also telling (has it ever been on the top 20 list?).

Does anyone know numbers for these sales, or is that a highly guarded commodity?

I wonder if the secret to WoW staying on top are the regular bannings? Glad Oblivion is doing so well.

Homm5 is outsold in its release month by Civ4 (now six months old) ?

HOMM 5 was out only a week during that sales period. I imagine it would of been in top ten, maybe top 5 if it had an entire month.

It’s nice to see Rise of Legends up there. I had some worries about how well it would do given its unusual theme.

The durability of AoE3 is astonishing - staggering even. It shows that the Age series is a power franchise than can overpower any Chick/Geryk reviews or bet-hedging word of mouth.

Troy

Shame we dont have GalCiv2 on the list anymore.

And… how long have the sims been on the list now… it… never ends.

WOrld of Warcraft on #2 still, that is amazing, people must be buying their 2nd or 3rd accounts by now.

I’m not. When we were allowed to invite people to try it out, we used every invite we could (my friends\guild). Amazingly, most of the folks that I invited bought Factions when it came out. Even more interesting: They couldn’t play with the people that had both so they went out and bought the Original - Prophesies.
That’s a small sample, but applicable on a larger scale I’m sure.

It’s also a good alternate to a monthly subscription service as well.
NC-Soft seems to be doing something right for us older hard-core PC enthusiasts.
;)

They should drop the price of previous box every time a new one is released, imho.

I guess my experience is the direct opposite of yours. I played GW when it came out, but we always had trouble getting enough of my old gang online to do some group PvP. And after a while, people sort of drifted away. For some reason, the quick in-and-out nature of the PvP made it less compelling for me (not to mention it’s less compelling when you’re doing 4 on 4 PvP with strangers). And the PvE game was … well, let’s say “not incredibly exciting.”

When Factions came out, maybe half of the original GW gang got it. And they’re still having trouble getting 8 people to do the guild based PvP. Yeah, you can go with NPCs but it’s just not as fun. So I guess the bottom line is, GW didn’t do it for me, and as a result, I’m surprised to see it continuing to sell well.

Woo Guild Wars!

I think a lot of people buy this game expecting to see WoW lite and just get really dissappointed to see Diablo II.

It’s good stuff though, I don’t know what guild you belong to (the Qt3 guild?), but we of the former OO guild made a whole new one because we merged with quite a few like-minded guilds. There are at least three fairly active guilds in our current alliance… so if your guild has declared Kurzick, shoot me a pm or something and I can get you in. GvG happens pretty frequently in our little gang.

I guess we went into it with different expectations. Some had played the demo so they were informed on what they were buying.
I dunno, I always say “It’s not the game, it’s the company you keep” that makes an online game fun for me.
We still play RS3, GR, SH3 & Freelancer together…

Man, Blizzard must be making so much money on the boxed copies of WoW, they could probably afford to run the game for free.

Oh crap, he went there…
$40 X 6 million ($40 being a guess at the average)
$240,000,000 Game Sales give or take a few million depending on price.

$10 x 12 months x 6 million people (almost).
$120 X 6 Million
$720,000,000 annually in subscription fees.

No wonder why they call it WoW, that’s what Blizzard said when they figured out the math…

I wonder how the European version of this list would differ from ours. The Japanese list would be very interesting as well.

On the other hand, the game card system in China and SE Asia makes it so that you don’t have to buy an actual copy of the game. You buy a time card and play at a cafe, and in some areas you might be able to keep that same card and just add credit to it when you need to. You don’t get a free month because you’re not buying the box. I’d put boxed copy sales at around the 2.5 million mark (NA, Europe, Australia and New Zealand) whereas the time card is a lot more popular in WoW’s biggest market (China and its neighbors). Something like 4 million of WoW’s sub base is over there.

And the definition of “subscriber” could be a thread of its own. This is Blizzard’s estimation:

“World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.”

So it’s not as cut-and-dry as all that. For one, when you buy the box, you’re automatically a subscriber, even if you never install the game. Two, it used to be seven days for IGR players, not thirty, so the numbers coming out of Blizzard are using, at this scale, some very different math than they were at the beginning of this year. And I’m no PhD, but extending the window by a factor of four can’t do anything but increase the end result. Especially when the customers in question comprise the overwhelming majority of your sub base.

Any way you look at it, though, Blizzard’s rolling in the dough. I just wish they’d use that money on some other projects and actually ship some other games once in a while. Have they given any indication that they are working on something other than WoW? And don’t mention SC: Ghost, because that game is as fake as DNF and we all know it.

WoW has become so succesful they probably need just about all their people on on it to manage the thing. Gotta feed the beast.

Well, Ghost was never in development by Blizzard, they just oversaw it. And when I went to the Irvine campus to check out the expansion last year, George Wang mentioned that there was a “Team 2” (don’t know if I remember the terminology correctly) working in another part of the building, and that I wouldn’t be able to go over there. I asked him what Team 2 does, and he said it was their RTS guys. Now, this could only have been WC3 staffers making new maps, but the restrictiveness of the area suggests otherwise.

Either way you slice it, though, we won’t know until Blizzard is good and ready to tell us. If you think info is going to leak regardless, recall how well they kept the lid on the Draenei, feinting with murlocs and pandaren. Even when we found out that it was the Draenei, no one knew which sub-group it would be, or their physical appearance.

Anyways, it’s a large company and they can work on multiple projects. Even though a hefty chunk of their WoW revenue goes into Vivendi’s coffers, they still probably have more capital than they know what to do with.

Ghost has hardly fake, it was on the show floor for several E3s. Blizzard just kept redesigning and redesigning until they ran out of time for current-gen.

I wonder what the source for that list is.

I’m privy to some of the sales figures on a few of those games and the order definitely makes no sense (and I know GalCiv’s sales versus some of them too and it would definitely be in the top 20 if not the top 10 in May).