WW Up..

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Barozi said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

XanderZane said:

Zlejedi said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

Conegamer said:

Wii is second after price cut week, so sad

BUT barely! 2k is nothing. I'm not screaming overtracked, because I'm not like that. But all these Sony fanboys screaming statistical tie or whatever seem to have quietened down when they're in the lead

Wii may make first, but more likely to stay second. Depends if PS360 drop after LA Noire, and by how much.

Didn't you learn the rule yet? It applies to every architecture: If your favourite console is first by a whisker, it's first, if it's second by a whisker it's a testicular pie!   

Although there are exceptions to fanboyism that are like a bright light in the obscurity: PC gaming is actually the biggest, but the most undertracked, nevertheless we PC gamers don't scream! Actually we got no time to do it, we must update drivers, fix bugs, get around incompatibilities and Windows quirks, etc to make our games eventually run.   

Speak about yourself ;) I always like to point out how rediculusly undertracked PC games on VGC are ;)

Overall PC gaming is still last compared to console & handheld gaming. Even if it was tracked correctly it still wouldn't make as much as console games do overall. Console game sales have over $100 billion yearly. Now the Witcher 2 is one of the most popular PC games ever and yet compare it's worldwide sales to a new IP like L.A. Noire and it doesn't even come close. Even if you included Steam sale and every online sales it wouldn't come close to what L.A. Noire sold in it's first week. and both of these games aren't even in the popular genre. What's the next HOT PC game coming out. Let's see how the sales do for that game. Only PC games  that seen to sell what are Blizzard games and EA's Sims games. Oh yeah and Valve's FPS.

If you track PC during a whole generation, it's always in the order of magnitude of the gen's winner, and it often beats it too. It doesn't beat all the home consoles of a given gen put together, though, this is true, because of the at least 300M PC gamers, only 1/3 play games with an intensity comparable to console gamers, even caual ones, and not mostly small, mostly free, games that are more casual than the most casual console ones. So yes, maybe PC gaming isn't as big as the whole console gaming, but it's in the same order of magnitude of the single biggest console platforms, and when the gen's winner doesn't exceed 100M by very much, PC becomes the first platform, taken individually.

Actually when we look at some multiplat games from the past few years, the PC versions are usually on par or below the PS3 versions. (Borderlands comes to my mind, Dead Space) and pretty much always lower than the 360 versions. (Bad Company 2, Mass Effect 2...) Now after the slim, PS3 software sales have risen to 360 levels.
http://fadellc.com/press_17.html

While PC exclusives can also have very high sales in the past few years (Half-Life 2, WoW, Starcraft 2, Sims 2) they still can't compare with the heavy hitters of Wii and 360.
(EDIT: haha just noticed that I mentioned a lot of last gen games in this paragraph.)

So no I don't agree that PC is the biggest platform at least in terms of revenue. Probably not even the 2nd biggest and after the slim effect, it's likely to assume that it's in last place now.
Biggest platform by amount of active gamers ? I guess so, but how many of them are pirating the games ? A lot it seems or else software sales would be much better.

In fact I meant mostly about HW and SW sales volumes. Piracy is higher and gross revenue is maybe lower for SW (but higher for HW), but dev costs are lower too, and there isn't the royalties standing charges. about the size of heavy hitters taken individually, you are totally right, no PC game ever reached the sales of XB, XB360, PS2, DS and Wii best sellers and very few PC games even reach PS3 best sellers, but it must be said that on those consoles too their few best sellers are out of reach for their other games. BTW I wrote in the same order of magnitude of the best as totala sales across a generation, because PC enjoys a more constant sales performances, while consoles start, reach a peak (or two like this gen with consoles getting rejuvenated at their mid-life) then they decline and are outsold by PC in their late years, and I also specified that particularly strong gen leaders like PS2 and DS, far exceeding 100M units sold lifetime, beat PC anyway from any point of view, not only SW gross revenue. But as I wrote answering XanderZane, PC market already was very different and it is even more now, so the comparison makes sense just for sake of comparing HW and SW unit sales of huge but different markets.

But that PC SW is hugely undertracked is totally, absolutely true!!!