Scoobes said:
r505Matt said:
Scoobes said:
r505Matt said:
Scoobes said:
r505Matt said:
Well, there's no way to know. You can't just mention a few popular games and say that's enough. Since there is no tracked sales data, it makes it difficult to determine.
But with digital platforms like steam, and their awesome deals, it's surely not dying.
Besides, WoW's supposed 11 million players (is that a grand total, or a current total? I've always wondered) doesn't even compare to Wii games' sales. Or just Nintendo games in general really. Essentially, the heavy-hitters on PC (in terms of sales) are still lightweights compared to games on consoles.
|
@ bolded: You contradict yourself. First you say there's no way to know and then say the heavy hitters are lightweights compared to console sales?
|
Not really, If WoW is considered a HUGE success on the PC with somewhere around 11 million sales, and yet there are plenty of console games that sell at least 10 million.
If you really wanted to go against my point, you'd talk about the subscription thing, but those are even harder to track. Who knows how many of that 11 million just played for 1 month, or 1 year. So in truth, that 11 million could equal something like 15, or 20, or 30 million in "sales".
I was really comparing to just WoW, which I keep hearing is the most successful game on the PC ever. It's not only because of the subscriptions (though that helps immensly), it's the extreme popularity for a game with a subscription.
|
I was going to raise this point but you seemed to be talking solely sales so I didn't want to skew the discussion by talking about the subscription. But as you have raised it, 11 million accounts and growing, not to mention the sales of expansion packs.
And as you've already mentioned, all those people are also willing to pay for about 1-1.5 game's worth of cash every year in subscription, so revenue-wise it's a pretty decent earner and probably much more profitable than even the most popular console games.
|
Got rid of some clutter above.
I don't know, I see WoW as more of an outlier anyways.
But yeah, I guess I did contradict myself -.- If I say there's no way to know since PC game sales aren't tracked, and then start making conclusions off of assumptions, it seems pretty ignorant of me (just had a discussion about the dangers of assuming too -.-). I do believe that console games sales far exceed PC games sales, but that could be wrong as well. It just seems to be the case that console games sell better, but we really don't know.
I'm totally just making assumptions, haha I'll stop now.
|
Lol, it happens. That's the biggest problem when debating PC sales, it's very difficult (currently) to track PC sales. We can estimate sales of one area (e.g. Steam) but it's only an estimation and only part of the overall equation. We really have no clue as to how well or badly a PC game might sell. It would be nice to have more sales data for PC and I do think it'll come in the future, but until then we have to keep making educated guesses.
One educated guess (a view common among PC gamers), and an explaination as to why console games seem to sell better, is that PC games are far less front-loaded than there console counter parts. Take a game like Starcraft for instance which has wracked up 10 million sales and continues to sell. However, it took nearly 10 yrs of sustained sales to get to that figure. That's the thing with PC games, they're pretty much always backwards compatible and now all available for digital download, so will always have a very long shelf-life.
|
