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The Sims Overtake Myst
krugdm writes "Gamespot is reporting that The Sims has now sold 6.3 million copies and has overtaken Myst as the best-selling PC game ever." My Sims lie dormant awaiting a wine that
can breath life into them once again. I just have been too busy to reboot.
Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
sulli
RTFJ.
I've always thought that the games like Sims are disturbing. I mean it's one thing to play a game were you do somethign you can't really do in the real life , like waste hordes of orcs or travel throught the City of Doors, but play in life?
I passed the Turing test.
Wait a second, Taco! You don't have time to reboot, but you would have time to put into the massive time-sucking vortex called The Sims?
Something's wrong here.
The most valuable commodity I know of is information. - Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street
It's weird that the top games are these non-violent, non-gorey games. But, the violent games far outnumber the non-violent ones.
That's unless you like trapping your sims in small shacks and setting fire to them.
Oh, and Mortimer punched me when I stole his wife.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
MS Solitaire? It's come with every version of PC based Windows I've ever seen.
This game has also produced 6.3 million examples of why humans shouldn't be God.
Here you go. BTW you are most welcome. :)
9
http://www.transgaming.com/gamepage.php?gameid=
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
one of the most revolutionary things about the sims is that a second version has not been important for so long -- that they can add more and more to the game with simple expansion packs that are relatively simple to create but hugely profitable.
it will be interesting to see where this model continues to go -- release a fairly simple but intricate and engaging first version and add to it continuously, for a fee.
go get it
Time scale always annoyed me. Click on the sink and it takes 20min (game time) to put away the dishes. Click on the radio and it takes 15 min to walk across the room to turn it on. You have to wake up 2 hrs before work for enough time to shit, shower and shave and then eat breakfast. Where do they get these lazy fucks?
It's always fun to invite your neighbors over to your house and then as they get confortable and think you're nice, suddenly invest in some walls and keep them there hostage! MUAHAHAH =)
Says something about human nature, eh?
Or does that just speak volumes about me?
Perhaps I should keep these observances to myself.
My Sims lie dormant awaiting a wine that can breath life into them once again
Mine sleep in vomit : wine abuse ?
for a mod to put my Sims on the Myst island.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
Look, you can even buy a distro (Mandrake) where they bundle in The Sims. And the bonus is you can then play Warcraft III when it's released, becuase it includes a sub to transgaming.
So reboot already. The time for Linux to be the gaming platform of the future is now. Windows is dead, and Bill G is starting to realize this. Good thing he cashed out a lot of money for his (actually good) Foundation.
Got me The Sims. Gonna get Warcraft III. Need Black and White for WINE next.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
"I just have been too busy to reboot."
Does that mean you're too busy to play as well?
I'm waiting for a plug-in that lets me go house to house and frag my Sims at leisure. Then I'll feel like a God...
"Goodness, how did you people ever live long enough to invent tools?"
-Hobbes (the tiger, not the philosopher)
"Goodness, how did you people live long enough to invent tools?" -Hobbes (the tiger, not the philosopher)
Gender repression denial is a hugely untapped market.
Can anyone explain to me why this game is not exactly like playing with Barbie dolls? Granted, I play lots of console games...maybe this is another thing I just don't "get". =)
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
I don't know the numbers on those two titles, but considering how many PC BANG (bang is korean for room) I.e. game houses that are popping up specializing in CS, it made me wonder if this entire article was just marketing "fluff"
I just don't see many pcbangs renting out stations so people can play SIMS.
Non-violent? I have to say one of the most disturbing (yet mildly amusing) comments about a video game on Slashdot came from CmdrTaco last year:
Referring to the possibility of a Sims TV show:
"This sounds pretty lame... unless they use my Sim Neighborhood: I used skins from 20 Female Television stars ranging from the girls of Friends, Xena, Buffy, and beyond. I made many households and played the game normally for awhile. After the ladies all fell in love with each other, purchased everything available in the game, and had successfull careers, I started luring neighbors over and trapping them in my attic, or drowning them in my pool. You haven't lived until you've seen Xena Warrior Princess die in a terrible grill fire while Sculley flails her arms in terror. Now that would be good TV. Especially with anatomically correct skins."
I do not understand the draw of this game. There, I said it. I live life every day, mow the lawn when it needs it, go to work...why the HELL would I want to play a "game" within which I get to do the same crap? I play to escape and solve mysteries/puzzles, put my tactical and strategic wargaming skills against those of the computer or another person. Why do I want to play a game where I have to go to work, mow the lawn, etc?
That said, I WOULD find it interesting if the game maker would BRING BACK the plague hamster that kills. Add plagues, pandemics, crime, terrorists, serial killers... THAT would be frickin' cool (or COULD be if done properly). You character goes for a walk at night and gets mugged or does the wrong girl/guy and gets a disease. Has a car accident. Make it gritty and more unpredictable. Toss in the wildcards. THAT would make it more interesting.
As it is, I'll never touch it or even look at the box. I'll stick with Deus Ex, Half-Life, the coming Call of Cthulhu (YEAH!), and Warcraft III. REAL escapist fun games.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I didn't think it was that hard to get my female roomies to become lovers. A couple of back rubs and compliments and they were sharing the same bed and kissing right and left.
Guvegrra?
- Its worldwide appeal spans hard-core gamers, casual computer users, and even gaming's most elusive group of consumers, women. Over
- 50 percent of new Sims players are female."
Other game makers should take heed to this. Targetting females or more specifically not targetting only males would make a lot of other games sell much better. IANAW, but I'm sure women aren't impressed with big breasts and alpha blended puddles of blood. And to tell you the truth, I don't care for it much either.Sure, a hot chick on the box will sell a few copies but good gameplay and depth in a game is what makes people tell thier friends to buy the game too. Say what you want about the Simms - it's definatly an involved game. That's why it sold so good.
Just my opinion.
It's weird that the top games are these non-violent, non-gorey games. But, the violent games far outnumber the non-violent ones.
No. It's all about the system requirements. A game like the Sims has a much larger population to sell to than a Quake.
Of course Quake is a bad example. Id games are not merely about retail sales, licensing their engines are a big part of their business. So while Quake's requirements are a little steep, next years games based on the same engine do not seem as bad.
The licensing of the engines also contributes to the raw number of titles that show up. There can be a lower cost of entry to game business this way, less risk, etc.
I know people don't like hearing this, but I never really considered Myst a game. It was more like a story book with some clicking thrown in, and some maddeningly inane puzzle things.
Nice story, bad game. Obiously, quite a few people disagreed, but whatever.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
What does it say about our society today that the Sims games are so popular? Video games were always a pretty antisocial pursuit, but at least we didn't fool ourselves into thinking they weren't. The Sims becomes a replacement for living our own lives, and we don't even mind it.
It's amazing how the Sims can suck people into this alternate reality where the game play consists of managing characters who, for the most part, are just living their lives. And all of a sudden you look up and it's six hours later, and you haven't taken out your own trash, or called one of your friends, or worked out, and are eating cold leftover pizza. And instead of being bothered by the irony of that, you tell yourself, "just a few minutes more, I almost have these two characters ready to get married."
It's way creepy. And even creepier that I'm thinking "gee, it's been a while since I fired the game up, I think maybe I'll go see where I left off." And I should be going to the gym, cleaning the house, making dinner or spending more time trying to find a job!
I just have been too busy to reboot.
I guess that's better than too busy rebooting, like the rest of us working under Windows. *sighs*
Hm, Myst was the #1 game for a long time, and now The Sims is the #1 game? That's two for two games that I can't stand...
My girlfriend and I started doing the same thing - "my hunger bar is turning red," "just let me finish maxing my fun bar, then I'll work on the social bar." The most frightening Sims moment is when she stood behind my chair waiting to talk to me while I was playing Sims, in which the Sims character was playing a computer game while his partner waited to talk to him.
The Sims has MASS MARKET appeal. That's why its the #1 selling game of all time.
Sure, CS and Warcraft3 and Doom3 appeal greatly to the 'hardcore' gaming crowd, but that market is insignificant next to the throngs of women, men, adults, children of all ages who think The Sims is a lot of fun.
And I hate to break it to you, but these games (CS, Warcraft) aren't ever going to appeal to the mass market -- unless later iterations are changed to the point of pissing off the existing players, that is.
A game with no people or a game with roboslaves to allow you to play god. Sounds like geek heaven to me. If only the real world could be that way. We could all be the far weird comic book store guy from the Simpsons.
it will be interesting to see where this model continues to go -- release a fairly simple but intricate and engaging first version and add to it continuously, for a fee.
Zillions of Web sites operate under the same model: Yahoo Mail, Salon.com, Slashdot...
Heck, even Microsoft started doing the same thing when it began charging for Microsoft Plus! and service packs to Windows 95.
Someone above posted that they'd pay to be able to put their sims on Myst island. That got me thinking, wouldn't it be cool if you could put the sims in other games as well.
You could get your sim to work out and become a football player and play him in the next Madden.
They could join STAR and be in the next Resident Evil game.
They could become drug lords and be in next GTA
The possibilities abound!
Me, I'm waiting for the iPod version, so I can upload my sim onto some computers at CompUSA, it would then lounge around with other uploaded sims, acting as an itelligent agent looking for kewl software for me to later download.
I'm not saying that women don't/can't enjoy games popular with men, just that most women I know don't care for them. When I picked up a copy of the Sims for my brother, a friend of mine gushed over the box and said she'd buy a PC just to play the game and its expansions. Hot Date was a popular birthday gift among women friends.
Perhaps a romance-style adventure, heavy on the character-interactive, would appeal to many women. I don't know - I'm a guy, so my clue factor is pretty low when in comes to games-that-appeal-to-women.
Most programmers/game designers are men - I think it's probably pretty obvious that a game company that wants to cater to women should go woman-heavy in recruiting designers/coders.
A stripped down demo version of The Sims would have sucked, taken too much work, and severely delayed the release of the actual game. Instead, Maxis released SimShow to introduce people to The Sims and kick start the skin industry before the game was released in March 2000.
Given the choice, Maxis thought it would be better for fans to have a simple useful tool for creating content that enriches the game, than yet another useless lobotimized game demo.
Of course the best place to see thousands of user-created Sims demos is The Sims Exchange, where players have uploaded more than 50,000 families. You can view the houses and people on family web pages and albums with stories about them. And if you have the game, you can download and play with any of them.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
If they're in that advanced stage of alcoholism to not even be able to move, they shouldn't be picking and choosing the type of wine. pick any alcoholic beverage and run with it. i guess the sims have a 1 step AA program: step 1 -- just don't run on wine. ;)
The Sims has capitalised on a very smart way of getting grown men (amongst others) to play with dolls.
They're not dolls, they're action figures. That's what my son tells me about all his transforming figures, LotR figurines, and all that stuff.
Now if you could just do magic in The Sims - sweet!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Somebody who can actually justify posting as an AC!
I disappoint enough people in real life without having to shatter the mind of some poor virtual bastard too.
Thats some funny stuff! (Put some laughs into an otherwise dull day...Well except when "Lifes Been Good..." came up on my playlist...that was not to bad)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I'd wager good money that while the sims and myst sold more games, Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Starcraft or even Everquest have been played more hours by the fewer people.
Granted, this doesn't make publishing companies happy (except for Verant maybe), but it should make the developers happy.
"As it is, I'll never touch it or even look at the box."
It's hard to appreciate anything if you oversimplify it. Now there are 6.3 million people that think you're an idiot, heh.
"Derp de derp."
>His Scully and Xena skins were sporting wangs.
Exactly, that would make perfect sense for someone in the computer programming profession.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I gave up on the game after the first time playing it.
Ten minutes (real life ten minutes) just to walk over to the fridge and open the door to get some food. . . . nooo thank you!
The Japanese do MUCH better LifeSims IMNSHO.
Besides, the game is WAAAAY to limited. Unless I can plot to control the world, what's the point?
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
But, but I thought all PC games were warezzzzzzzzzzzed!
I thought that rampant copying and wanton piracy were destroying the industry!
I thought that people would never buy something they could just rip and download for free!
I thought that games were a niche market!
I thought that games would never appeal to the mainstream!
I thought PC games didn't make any money!
Whaddya wanna bet whoever came up with the idea for this game had to perform the equivalent of giving birth to a washing machine in order to get it green-lighted by the publisher?
This game has made approximately Three HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in gross sales (if it was priced at $50).
This provides a two-word answer to any game publisher from this point forward who says:
"Ehhh, PC games can't make money"
"Ehhh, ehhh, Piracy is damaging the industry"
"Ehhhh, you need state of the art 3D graphics to sell"
"Ehhhh, people only want to play action games"
"The Sims"
Of the top two best selling PC games of all time, with a total combined sales of approximately ELEVEN MILLION UNITS, one was an adventure game and the other was a simulation.
Hmmm.. maybe the MARKET IS TRYING TO TELL THE GAME INDUSTRY SOMETHING, YOU THINK????
ahem...
this is shipped units, not sales. There is no mention of the return rate. I'd be interested in seeing what NPD cosnidered the most selling game of all time as their figures come from retail sales, not manufacturer shipping invoices.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
They didn't kick me out at all, I was bored as fuck, and dropped out.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!