What was the Greatest Launch Title of all Time?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Wyrdness said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

I showed WW numbers because I couldn't find European-only numbers in most cases. The Amiga stands at 4.2M in Europe only, the Amstrad is almost all European numbers, same for the Atari ST. That's already 9M just for those 3 platforms in Europe. While that's less than 14M, they are just a part from the European market. A small part, I might add.

Atari tried to realign to consoles because the Atari ST flopped compared to the main competitor, the Amiga - just look at the sales numbers I provided. Plus, it was very frontloaded (half of it's sales were done by 1988 while the Amiga peaked in 1991). It just couldn't keep up with the competition in the computer field. What's more, the ST was bleeding money. They tried to address this with the Falcon, but when it failed, they axed the entire Computer line in favor of the Jaguar, hoping it would have worldwide appeal, not just in Europe.

Also, if the Consoles would have killed the computers, then why did Atari kill it's 7800 successor, the Atari Panther, planned to release in 1991, early in development, resulting them to leave the console market for 2 years after they pulled the 7800 in 1992?

Your conclusion is just biased and slanted. I could prove just as well that consoles were a flop by comparing Amiga sales in Europe to PC their Engine sales and declare that consoles couldn't catch on in Europe. Out of those 158M

Finally, PC sales exploded in the early 90's. Out of those 158M, over 60 were just from 1993-1994, at a time when most companies already had computers. Why? Well, because some little game called Doom, that's why. Id Software at the time made $100,000 daily just from the sales of the $9 shareware episode unlocks. In other words, they sold over 10k games on a daily basis. The game was played by 10M people within 2 years of it's launch. Other games also put the PC into the frontlight, like the Monkey Island Series, Civilization II

Now tell me, how can a game sell 10M copies if the platform is dead?

Again this is highlighting my point as NES and SMS came from what was a dead market to outperform and chip away at the HC market which caused their downfall as the SNES and MD took over. Atari flopped because the gaming market shifted from HC to consoles hence why the main competitor the Amiga still couldn't stand against the new consoles competitively that side of the market had ran its course this is why companies like EA who wrote the consoles off were forced to end up developing for them as the business had to shift with the market.

93-94 is when the PS1 and Saturn were arriving with in two years that's 96 pushing into the late 90s era that I mentioned so again this doesn't disprove my point especially as Doom was also ported to consoles like the SNES, PS1, Saturn, Sega 32X etc... which are included in that 10m figure in the years prior to this the HC market had withered away and PCs ended up inheriting it. But lets give your 10m figure the benefit of the doubt and say those are all PC users WiiU was a dead platform and one of the worst modern console performers yet MK8 still sold 8.4m more than many games on other platforms so that point doesn't really reflect the state of the gaming market, PCs sold because their level of utility at that point had risen due to better functions as a gaming platform it was a roller coaster affair for PCs because this was the era of compatibility issues and inconveniences which were the down sides to some of the great games that emerged in the mid to late 90s period and it was like that for another decade until Steam arrived and remedied the problem.

Doom was ported to those platforms, sure. I even have a SNES version of the game (pretty horrible port btw). But those sales combined don't even come close to 1M, while those 10M are PC alone. And even if they were included, that would make the PC sales "just" like 9.5M. What non-Mario, Zelda or Tetris game at the time did even come close to those sales?

Compatibility issues were getting rare by that time. Most were from earlier with the soundcards, but by 1989 AdLib and Soundblaster started to become the baseline for every soundcard to follow until this day. As for the 3D graphics that came afterwards, they generally had either both Glide and DirectX, OpenGL and DirectX, all 3 of them, and early on additionally software rendering (meaning rendering by the CPU). there were actually more compatibility problems starting 2006 than before that time, with DirectX10 annulling some of earlier version's features (especially Hardware T&L), the slow rise of 64bit OS (making any 16bit code unusable) and the killing of the integrated DOS (for DOS games, obviously). And guess what? Steam didn't solve any of those problems, or even have any influence on them. It wasn't even the first online Shop or Launcher (look up Stardock Central, for once. Or RealArcade).

You simply fail to acknowledge that everybody who had a computer at home used it to play games. Maybe not exclusively, but anybody who says he didn't play on that computer is a damn liar.

Also, just to come back to those 158M PCs in the 85-94 Timeframe: If consoles killed PC gaming, how come more than half of them are just from 92-94, and almost a quarter of those 158M is just 1994 alone. Even we acknowledge a growth in office use, that alone can't explain the explosion of PC sales in those years. In other words, the market was growing, not shrinking.

As an anecdote, I remember far more PC gamers from that period than console gamers. I remember 14 computer gamers (2 Amiga, 2 C64, 1Mac LC, 1 Amstrad, 8 PC, 9 if you count the fact that I had 2 different ones (a 286 and a 486 DX-40) in that period), yet only 6 consoles (1 NES, 2 Master System, 2 Super Nintendo, 1 Megadrive). Like I said, it's just an anecdote, but console gaming was simply not that popular.

I think you might be under the impression that what happened in the UK would be true for the continent, too. I know the UK has pretty much switched from their tape computers like the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum straight to consoles in the late 80's, but that's simply not true for mainland Europe except maybe in France (who jumped at the NES and the Guillemot brothers (founders of Ubisoft) imported the PC Engine through a special company just for that).

In fact, this might be the reason why France and UK sell more consoles than Germany despite their smaller population and economy: They jumped at the consoles when they arrived. But the other countries in Europe for the most part did not follow that trend at that time and only really jumped in during PS1 or even PS2 times. Why do you think Europe is Sonyland, after all? Certainly not because of nostalgia for Nintendo...