COD actually is not that big on PC.

I can tell you that Stalker had much bigger hype in Poland then any of pc versions of COD.

Also on PC market a lot of sales are made through various budget reeditions or collections while COD4 has been kept at RRP for ages.

2 million SOLD by shops and DD...but about 8-10 million downloads from torrent sites,that offer multiplayer too (pirate servers).

I know it`s sad,but they are thinking...why spend 50$ (the price mentained high foe ages) when I can download day 1 and play multiplayer day 1 for free?

The biggest enemy to DD and Pc gaming is DP (Digital Piracy).

The reason I say they don't display proper sales is because most publishers don't discuss digital game sales at all. If they did we would know exactly how many downloads fl0w, World of Goo, Braid, WipeOut HD, Warhawk, Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, and the hundreds of other games have sold.

Valve used a blanket statement. They stated since Steam was launched Half-Life sales over a million a year through Steam. While we get confirmation of over a million sales a year we still don't know how much over a million it is. Last year alone due to the Half-Life anniversary it could have sold 1.5 million copies. That is over a million copies and doesn't go against what Valve stated.

You might be right on revenue gained from DD, but even ~$1b can be considered a great amount of income considering some games might only cost $50k to make versus retail games which can still cost several million to make.

There is no possible way that COD4 sold "only" 2 million on the PC, just no way.

It would be nice if publishers did reveal the extent of DD in terms of both revenue and sales for both PC and consoles. I can only think of 2 reasons why they don't reveal solid numbers for DD:

1. They really are insignificant and don't bother as they don't see the need or

2. The sales are very good, publishers are making a lot money on DD and is increasing every year and don't want traditional retailers realising how good DD sales are for fear of them not stocking there product or starting up rival DD services (which could explain why Valve's number are so wishy washy).

I believe that gaming on PC has shifted somewhat, although Piracy plays a hand too. My view:

1) many gamers who would formally have played something like CoD4 have switched to 360 and PS3 - certainly earlier versions of CoD I'm sure would have sold more on PC than console, so we're seeing a switch of focus here

2) A lot of PC gaming now is MMOs and similar genres, so there is less demand for CoD4 on PC than there would have been historically for big FPS

3) Yes, piracy no doubt didn't help - I suspect many more than 2 million PC gamers have and are playing CoD4, but not all paid for the game for sure

4) I think that when a title shifts to 360/PS3 as CoD has, it gets somewhat snubbed by certain PC gamers. I'll be curious, for example, to see what happens with Rage as id really step into consoles for the first time - note Valve seem to be the exception here but I'll be watching their ratio of sales for the next view PC/360 releases to see what happens


So in short, certain titles will sell more on PC but it's no longer a given that big FPS will sell more on that platform. I think just US/UK alone drives a huge swing from PC to console these days for FPS titles.

Heck - I even got CoD4 for PS3 vs PC (first time I didn't favour PC for a big FPS).

Actually, digital downloads accounted for almost $3 billion on the PC in 2008, almost a quarter of its total worldwide revenue and nearly the same as boxed retail income.

I'd imagine the figures for DD in 2009 can only be higher.

As for COD 4, 2 million sales is a fine number for a multi-platform PC title with very high sales on the consoles. It'd be interesting to see how much money Activision made per platform, with a significant amount likely to have been bought through DD and no licensing fees, the PC version must have been very lucrative indeed and certainly well worth their while releasing. As for piracy- why worry about it? The people who pirated the game wouldn't have bought it anyway.

Almost no publisher releases figures of digital sales because that only undermines their relations with retailers, or because they have too much at stake on retail. The only big publisher I can think of that talks of digital sales is EA, but that might be because EA is the major publisher that is currently pushing the digital and online business more than any other major publisher.

And is false that when Activision talks of figures, they're for worldwide or includes digital sales. When they said that COD4 sold 7 millions, everyone thought that it was a worldwide figure, but infact it was a figure from only about 6 countries, which were tracked by NPD, Charttrack and GFK. They didn't include dozens of countries, nearly all of them PC-centric markets. They didn't include a single country from eastern europe, where Stalker sold 1 million.

That 7 million figure actually helped in knowing how much COD4 it had sold on PC, in those markets. I had estimated that around 2.2 millions from those 7 millions were from the PC version, and that didn't even include dozens of PC-centric markets or digital sales. http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/post.php?id=2436222

There's just NO WAY that COD4, which dominated PC Retail charts for months, dominated Digital charts for ages, and is still selling even now, NO WAY that it only sold around Stalker, a game that did not even appear more than a couple of times on retail charts and barely set foot on top digital charts.

COD4 sold ABOVE the level of Sims 2 and World of Warcraft in it's first year, and even now it still has strong legs, especially considering it hasn't even dropped in price.

Call of Duty is easily one of the biggest FPS franchises on PC, on par with Counter-Strike and Half-Life.

Almost no one ever heard of Stalker until it actually came out. If there was hype it was probably only in eastern europe, where the stalker franchise is much more known.

There are more PC games being bought on Digital Distribution than on Retail, right now.

Even if a game isn't reported on financial reports companies like us, the NPD Group, GfK, etc should be able to get the sales information from publishers but we can't.

Also yes BF1943's record sales were announced but how many copies were sold?

I believe the reason for this is B&M retailers, like Scoobes second point states. Employees at Gamestop are not allowed to talk about DD sources including the PSN, XBLA, and WiiWare because they do not get any revenue from sales of titles on any DD service.

This is also why Sony cannot stop UMD game production even though the PSP Go is digital download only. If they canned the PSP-3000 or any future PSPs with UMD drives without providing even vouchers of some form to retail sell no retailer in the world but Sony would sell it.

What competition did COD 4 have as far as the PC goes? I imagine the selection of FPS for people to play would be even more generous there however not being a PC gamer I simply wouldn't know but it could have been competing with PC exclusives with more hype than a consolified shooter.