Thanks IOI things were getting a little out of hand there. Thanks Foamer for giving some kind of reference point but obviously any figure that includes a premise where we multiply a known figure by even 9 is subject to huge inaccuracies.

The articles you quote are produced by bloggers whose reason for writing is to 'prove' the relevance of PC gaming at a time when the opposite camp quotes provable retail sales figures approaching 10 to 1 in favor of consoles. I view these figures with the same scepticism as the 40:1 piracy ratio quoted I believe by NPDs Anita Frazier. Crytec CE Cevat Yerle says it"s half that. I'll call it 30.

PC gaming may be the foundation the industry was built on, or the 'root of all evil' to some (Fox News) but Dragon Age is a throwback these days. DA:O PC sales rival 360 because of the toolset and mod community but combined life-time sales on PS3 and 360 could double legit. PC buyers and ensure DA:2. Despite numerous bashings it is a good game on the box and much preferable to not playing it at all.

ME2 on the other hand will show more usual ratios of 4 or 5 to one in retail copies with the digital DL system being anyone's guess. IMHO a ballpark would be 3.8 million LT on 360 and a total on PC of around 2.5?. Either way we'll be seeing a sequel. Now if you'll excuse me it's time for some Kommander Kickass.

I haven't quoted any articles from blogs, the figures are taken from a site that scrapes Steam user profiles and aggregates them. Figures from the PCGA indicate that retail and digital download sales were on a par for 2008 and DD would exceed retail last year. As an example, CoD4 sold 360K at retail first month. IW have stated that CoD6 exceeded CoD4's first month, yet NPD gave the retail PC figure as 170K- the other 190K+ must have come from DD.

PC gaming is more relevant than ever these days, 25 million Steam users prove that.

As for piracy, Crysis sold over 1.5 million. Are we seriously to believe over 30 million people downloaded it?

I wish the PC numbers for software could be tracked...

According to naznatips.

http://www.vgchartz.com/games/wall.php?id=13834 (Look in the comments)

"We have no reliable way to track PC game sales because at this point so many of them are made online that we would be massively undertracking everything."

I don't get why they can't just report the retail sales and make it clear that that's what the figures are.

Yes, that's what good software will do. I can see 360 hardware picked up!