"Where is our success story? Uh...minus WoW and The Sims, the two highest selling games on ANY platform."
Oh come on. You know we are discussing games targeted at high end users. And you simply can't count The Sims, because core gamers aren't the ones playing that and buying the expansions. The people who are are too scared to even try and torrent it, or EA would have DRMed that title up its ass too.
I think the Wikipedia list of best selling games is interesting, and you can draw some conclusions from it.
Yes, the 10 million was a deliberate exaggeration on my part, and yes the PC has had some heavy hitters, but our current batters aren't look very good.
Crysis had a lot of competition on release. Crysis, UT3, and CoD4 all released within days of each other, with Quake Wars and Orange Box coming out a month before. I mean, that has to impact sales. Not to mention PC games rarely have the same kind of advertising budget as big name console games. I never once saw a Crysis commercial but I sure as shit saw that Gears of War "Mad World" spot two dozen times at least. And I don't even watch TV outside of like 3 shows.
UT3 and Quake Wars competition? Combined, their sales didn't exceed 300,000. And The Orange Box was out a
month earlier, and wasn't a muscle game anyway.
Also the exact same competition existed on the consoles, except more, and each of the games sold better.
Look, all I am saying is that we just know about the 8 million 8800 series cards sold. Who knows how many more were sold from ATi, and other better ones from Nvidia. If you compare the games versus high end video card base percentage versus the games versus next gen console percentage, you find a fair difference.
The patch thing from Relic is interesting, though its hard to make a real call on it. Most people have high speed internet so they don't back up patches to apply again, they'd rather redownload them. Downloads also fail or become corrupt, forcing a redownload. Not saying its not telling that a lot of pirates are grabbing the patch, but the actual number would be hard to pin down.
I agree with that of course, but I remember Shawn Elliot asking him about the patch downloads, and the Relic guy mentioned unique ip addresses. Surely not all 20 million were pirates, but even if it was couple million, it was a significant number.
It is densely packed on the left side of the graph, well under even the 1 million mark. Now look at the scores. Its not all shit and shovelware, lots of games with high ratings sold "poorly." Or at least poorly compared to the likes of GTA and other such blockbuster games.
Why are you comparing the games on the
bottom of that list, to the games on top of the PC list?
Our best selling PC title of recent times, The Orange Box, sold 2 million.
Obviously we can go on with this forever. Like you guys said, all I can do is speculate.
I know. I just hate bullshit excuses.
haha well Epic are in a fix. When CliffyB is honest, we call him names. When Mark Rein tries to be diplomatic, we call him names. I think these people are fast realizing that there is no point in saying anything at all.
For the record, I do think Rein is an ass.