A Rare Glimpse at Steam Sales Figures

Sadly, Valve never releases sales figures for its Steam digital shopfront on the PC. So we never get an overall idea of how popular the platform is. Sometimes, though, figures slip out, and today is one of those days.

Guillaume Rambourg, from competing service Good Old Games, has revealed sales figures from a single title, The Witcher 2, and it makes for impressive reading if you work for Valve. It's dispiriting if you work for anyone else.

Good Old Games sold 14,000 copies of the game, not bad for a service geared mainly towards retro titles. Rambourg then says all other major digital retailers combined, that being Direct2Drive, Impulse and GamersGate, sold only 10,000 copies. Again, that's combined.

And Steam? It sold 200,000 copies.

If you want to know why EA is so dead-set on cracking the PC digital delivery market, this is why. That's an awful big slice of the pie for a single company to be feasting on.

"Your customers hate DRM" - Rambourg [GI.biz]

http://kotaku.com/5858589/a-rare-glimpse-at-steam-sales-figures

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I actually expected a bit better, great quality game, still PC exclusive... but it's no surprice Steam has the biggest piece of the cake..

hmm thats alot for steam? well never mind for the witcher on steam it does seem big especially compared tp the other retailers.

hmmm, is that alot for digital sales? honestly I was expecting much bigger numbers, maybe around 400 - 500k.

I have no idea.. if you would ask shio he would say there low numbers cause he always says steam sells millions (legendary Shio's CoD4 sold 10 million thread)
but seeing that last time they talked about the Witcher 2 sales late august..

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-30-witcher-2-sales-are-nearly-1-million

The number recorded by developer CD Projekt was 940,000 sales for the first half of 2011.
Of those sales, 200,000 were digitally distributed copies of The Witcher 2.

so thats like 21% digital vs 79% against retail... I actually would have thought that the sales would be reversed in PC land... like 60~ 70% digital

The Witcher 2 is a bit of an anomaly, in terms of the retail digital split. The fact that the retail copies all have a bunch of extras probably has a lot to do with it even the standard price SKU comes with a map, collectable coin, paper craft et,c and the fact the game is ~15GB to download is probably also a factor.

I think the main issue is that The Witcher is primarily targeted to Europeans who likely do not use digital services as much as Americans.

The key takeaway should be total sales, not just the digital-retail split. They've done pretty well so far with the game. Unlike retail, it will continue to sell on Steam, GoG and other services for a very long time. The Witcher: Enhanced Edition has about 50% more sales thus far, which should tell you where The Witcher 2 should end up.

Steam? i forgot it was on steam, i thought it was only released on GoG.com

will sell much more when it releases in xbox.