Half Life 2 Retail Sales Hit 1.7 Million

blueZhift writes "It looks like PC gaming is not dead yet! GamesIndustry.biz reports that retail sales of Valve's Half Life 2 have topped 1.7 million. There aren't any numbers available for online sales via Steam, but these are impressive numbers for any platform, console or PC."

Comments

Re:The Future

[PoderOmega]

How many times is this FUD example going to come up? Yes, it is possible this will happen. But I have a feeling if this type of situation arose, Valve would release a non-steam patch before totally going out of business. Yes Steam authenication sucks, and I hope someone does sue them to prove that I did, in fact, buy that game, not just a license to play by their rules. But I would bet cash that if there was a steam doomsday, there would be a non-steam patch release.

Re:Get your facts straight

[dougmc]

There are HDTV capable consoles (Xbox and Gamecube) but you have to buy the HD plugs and obviously have a HDTV.

So there are. But it looks like only certain games support these enhanced resolutions -- which I guess is true for PC games too.

Whether the keyboard/mouse combo is better for FPSs is debatable as well as based on personal preferance.

Really, what's happened is that console games have been dumbed down to be playable with the little joysticks/joypads that they give you. With a mouse, you can zero in on the bad guy's face and get a head shot off very quickly -- with a joypad, it would take much longer to do so, so the console game is set up to either auto-aim for you, or to make it so making head shots really isn't important to the game -- either you get no extra benefit from it, or the game is easy enough that you don't need to make them very often.

But if you tried to play something like the PC version of UT with a joypad like you had on an X-Box, vs. guys with keyboard and mouse, you'd get pwn3d quick. It's just that the PC version makes it important to be able to aim precisely, something the joypad just isn't good at.

Not quite. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can write a PC game. But to write a console game, you need to get a development kit from the console maker, and pay them royalties on every game made.

True, but how many PC games do you think are 'copy-cat' games?

Probably a number similar to the number of console games that are `copy-cat' games. The vast majority of games out there, PC and console, are copies of other games, with some tweaking or new features. Few are revolutionary rather than evolutionary.

The grandparent post of this post was claiming that `Exclusive PC titles are a rare breed these days' -- which couldn't be further from the truth. And I pointed out why. (Though I guess if you restrict yourself to `big budget, blockbuster titles', then maybe that statement is becoming true.)

As for consoles not getting RTSs is a matter of RTS games being TOO complex for the general gamer.

Ok, I won't argue too much about that -- I really can't claim to know too much about what your average console player wants.

But since there will always be `extra'-ordinary games, PC games will *never* die, at least until the consoles can cater to them a little better.