Foamer said:
Take a look at http://dev.zr40.nl/steam/games for some indication of Steam sales figures. Bear in mind that this is collated from achievement data scraped from public community profiles, which only account for ~40% of all active accounts, so the actual sales figures will likely be much higher, probably double the numbers here. Unfortunately, figures are only available for games with Steam achievements. Now, I freely admit this is a big stretch, but if we can extrapolate from peak concurrent users soon after a game has been released to get a ballpark figure for total Steam sales, then it would indicate that both Dragon Age and ME2 have sold extremely well. This is probably way off target but here's the reasoning- Torchlight is listed at 170,000 in the first link, it peaked at around 6,000 concurrent users soon after release. Ratio of ~28:1 L4D2 is listed at 680,000 in the first link, it peaked at around 25,000 concurrent users soon after release. Ratio of ~27:1 CoD6 is listed at 1,038,000 and has maintained a peak of around 110,000 concurrent users. Ratio of ~9:1 Mass Effect 2 has so far peaked at 15,500 over its first weekend and Dragon Age peaked at around 18,000 when it got released. Using even the lowest ratio above indicates that both have sold getting on for 150,000 on Steam alone, never mind at retail or through other DD. Using the highest ratios would indicate that they're approaching 500,000 each. Again that's on Steam alone. Now, the owner of Impulse reckons that Steam accounts for around 70% of total DD sales and from NPD data, retail and DD sales are about equal, although they expected DD to overtake retail this year. For the sake of argument, assume that DD now accounts for 60% of overall sales. Applying these ratios to the lowest estimates above- ME2:- 15,500 concurrent users => 139,500 sales on Steam (x9 using the CoD 6 ratio) => 199,285 total digital sales (Steam is 70% of the total) => 332,142 overall sales (digital distribution accounts for 60% of overall sales including retail). Using a similar method with the higher 27:1 figure, gives just under a million as the total. The actual overall figure should therefore be between 332,142 and 1 million. The retail component of this will be between about 133,000 and 400,000. So no, at retail the PC version has sold nowhere near the 360 version, even using the higher ratio. However, adding in DD the sales are still very healthy and very profitable to EA/ BioWare as there are no licensing fees and the DD version would be expected to realise higher profits as they don't have to ship any physical media. Of course, you could probably drive a coach and horses through the methodology above, but I think at least it gives an indication of ballpark figures and explains why companies continue to release on the PC- it's simply worth their while and makes them a stack of cash.
As for piracy, checking one of the largest BitTorrent trackers indicates that the XBox 360 pirated version accounts for about 25% of the total number of downloads. Not as high as the PC version of course, but pretty significant all the same. Oh, and the sales figures on this site are for 360 only. None of GOW, ME 1 or Fable have PC numbers included, they are all at 0.0 m- |
Thanks for the info. An interesting estimation. So PC could account for anywhere between 330K-1M sales of ME2, which even at the low end is a significant amount of revenue comming in.
