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Slimebeast on 27 January 2009
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shio said:
JaggedSac said:
famousringo said:
shio said:
Anyone noticed how Iron Lore's games started selling much better AFTER they closed down?? The timeline of 2008 is actually funny (and tragic):

February 27th: Iron Lore closes down.

March 4th: Soulstorm is released. It becomes nº1 selling PC game in most PC weekly charts, and entered in several european Overall Top10's including UK (was 8th in first week, then 10th in second week!).
Soulstorm also charted in Steam and Direct2Drive's Best Selling Games.

June 28th: Diablo 3 is announced, sends Titan Quest sales sky high! Titan Quest Gold reaches top10 of Steam/Direct2Drive and stays there for a couple of weeks, plus increases the game's sales on Amazon by the hundreds of percentage.

Throughout the rest of the year, Titan Quest and Soulstorm keep appearing on D2D and Steam's best sellers several times, sometimes because of Weekend Deals, others just because.

January 20th: Dawn of War 2's Beta is starting, Steam drops 75% off Soulstorm and reaches once again Steam's top10. Today it is currently 7th on Steam.

 

Seriously, am I the only one who thinks this is weird?

 

Weird isn't the word. It's alarming that these games can look so successful, yet their developer goes under. Suggests either a seriously flawed business model or some bad exploitation on the part of publishers.

Wasn't THQ Titan Quest's publisher? They haven't really been rolling around in the green lately...

Or maybe ranking in a top 10 list is meaninless unless number of units is given for them.  The number 1 game could have sold 1000 games.  That makes the rest of the list rather unimpressive.

 

Even if it was only 1000 copies every day, it would still mean 365k sales at the end of a year. Add the fact that on digital distribution the game will never lose shelf space and will keep selling "forever".... it's a win.

 

I already mentioned this before (I'm not sure if it was to you), the only figure we know about Steam is that Garry's Mod sold 312k in 2 years. It was released in 29th November 2006, and sold 5.7k in the first day, then went on to sell an average of 430 copies per day.
Now keep in mind that today Steam is several times bigger than it was in 2006 and wasn't as good as today... it was only after 11 months of Garry's Mod launch that there was a "BOOM" on Steam with Orange Box (Oct. 2007) and also with L4D/FM2009 (Nov. 2008), and the game hasn't charted in the last few months of that 2 year span from what I remember.

Steam is growing mad as hell. Here are some very rough estimates to give a more general view:

Nov 2006: Garry's Mod sells 5.7k in the first day, with 430 per day for the next 2 years => 312k.

Steam increases over 150% in 2007. Let's multiply the games' sales 2.5 times:
Nov 2007: "B" game sells 14.3k in first day, with 1075 copies per day for the next 2 years => 784k.

Let's say Steam increases over 150% again in 2008 (very probable), and multiply the games' sales 2.5 times:
Nov 2008: "C" game sells 35.8k first day, and 2687 copies per day for next 2 years => 1960k.

These are very rough calculations though, and many of the Steam sales increase is due in part of the staying power of the older games, so new games' sales aren't really increased 2.5 times. Also, there are much more new games coming out than there were before.

The upside is that Steam games will still keep selling after 2 years.

What on earth are you doing here?

You can't apply an increase in total sales on Steam on individual titles like that. You're just guessing.

The Steam sales increase comes most likely from an increased number of games being released on Steam and their back catalog getting bigger, not just from more people signing up.

It could well be the case that individual titles actually are getting lower average sales as more and more games are being available on Steam.
(since much like gaming consoles early in a gen, you had a lot of people signing up on Steam because of Valve's games, but they didn't necessarily have a lot of games to choose from - thus attach rate goes down drastically over time)