I'm getting insanely sick of you people not understanding something about the PC Market and more specifically the PC game sales part of the market.

"UT3 only sold 34k on PC zomg fail" 

"Crysis only sold 45k, phailure"

Sorry but in the PC market they will never fail. PC games arent like console games in which only have 1 month of sales then disappear into the sunset. PC games have legs that last years. Wolfenstein 3D which started the FPS genre is still selling and its been over 17 years? ya thats what PC games have legs that stretch for a long long time. There are people who are still buying Call of Duty 1. Unreal Tournament 3's legs will last and will continue to sell till after Unreal 4 is out. Unreal tournament 99 was still selling but epic instead of putting it on one disk put UT, Unreal, Unreal 2, and Ut04 into the anthology which means all of the games have renewed legs. 

Crysis will be an interesting case as there are few computers that can run the game above a 40fps so as computer hardware improves the more it will sell. I just talked my friend who works for EB. Getting his second 8800Ultra just to run it. 

The point is do not count out any games in the PC market, ever. They always make a profit, they always sell till the games are discontinued, and no console game will ever have life longer then any PC game ever until consoles are PCs. 

I think this list shows that games don't really sell on the PC, 43 million sellers ever on the PC is a pretty poor effort, the GC and Xbox managed to get 38 each last generation.

PC software is just too piratable. 

 theres a difference though. a game can make profit within the first 100k sold on PC. 

 ty, a very intelligent post, i was actually wondering about this in another thread.

 Besides, that list doesn't even have Starcraft on it!

It's probably not the most reliable one, yet. 

 they were just examples. Starcraft has sold tons especially in north korea

and, correct me if im wrong here, didn't it take a couple of years for WoW to be the successful behemoth that it is?

 ... no... the darn game has over 1 million members within the first month... so multiply the $15 fee times 1 million.. thats a ton of cash after the fact they made $50 per game too.

 oops my bad

PC games don't always do as well as you say. The PC is not a consistent platform by any stretch of the imagination; prior to 1995, Windows was just a shell for DOS, and after 1995, DOS was a shell in Windows. The limited support meant that old DOS games suddenly had a much harder time running on more modern PCs (not to mention Windows 3.1 games). And as the years go by and more new O/Ses and hardware revisions are made, PC games continue to slide off the charts thanks to incompatibility. I'd love to see somebody try to run Duke Nukem 3D on a modern PC without using any special software like DOSBox or JFDuke3D. Or Quake 1. Or any of those old FMV games, for that matter.

The PC has longevity, that cannot be denied. But it also has hardware and software volatility to accompany that. Only very recently has this stopped being a huge issue, with the processor speed cap being reached. And it's still an issue even then.