Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[JEMC]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

JEMC said:

^With most PC games sales coming from digital platforms (Steam, Origin, UPlay, GMG, GOG, etc) I doubt we'll ever be able to track those sales without their help. And they won't help.

Anyway, a couple days ago I complained about the lack of news. I won't make that mistake again.

[...]

True, but knowing that physical sales are just the point of the iceberg (except for particularly well priced physical collections or rich collector editions filled with maps, old style complete paper manuals and gadgets), we can get at least a vague idea, and when Steam and others release their numbers, we can get a more precise idea and try some rough estimates for other titles, based on similar ones that we have more infos about. Not very precise, but better than nothing...
About news, sometimes it looks like they come slow and scarce, then suddenly... About this, an updated VGC DB, with the possibility of adding new titles to users wishlists and collections fully restored, could help a little, when it worked I used that feature quite often both to track my existing backlog and to quickly add interesting new titles to my wishlist, sometimes getting inspiration from other users collections and lists, not just from news, reviews and forum posts.

But not every genre has the same % of retail vs. digital sales, and even then it greatly varies from game to game. For example, I'm sure The Witcher 3 got most of its sales through digital copies, but right now the game is cheaper on retail than on GOG or Steam, so the retail sales will have increased. If you pick its retail sales today an try to calculate the digital sales for it, the results will be off by a big margin.

Another example of problems with that system is Cities Skylines, which was available on Steam long before a physical, retail version of the game went on sale.

As for the second part of your post, I completely agree on everything.