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The Top 100 Best-Selling PC Games of the Century
Ground Glass writes "They already did this for consoles and handhelds, but now Next Generationhas finished the cycle by releasing a rather more interesting list of the best-selling PC games released since 2000. It's more interesting as, since most everyone has a Windows PC in some form or another, the games that are purchased for it are...rather more esoteric than you'd see being bought on console. You may also notice the sales numbers are quite a bit lower than on the other lists — is this the spectre of piracy given form? In any case, there's plenty of data to interpret here."
There tend to be a lot MORE PC games than console games released, so the market is more spread. The report is also only since 2000, which means that games from '05 and '06 have had far less time to sell budget copies and the like, than big games released 5 or 6 years ago.
Also, some people have terrible taste...
I saw this here before.
Despite the hyperbolic title, it's an interesting article. NetGen is a US console game maker's rag, so that's its slant. People around here seem to hate it, but I feel like I have a better handle on their bias than the "for gamer" sites. You might argue about sales in Japan or the triumph of PC gaming, but that's not the point. This article is telling us what games sell in the US market.
Success comes from
1) Tie-ins (take Lego Star Wars with *two* tie-ins)
2) Franchise
3) Price (there are a good number of B-grade games that got moved to the $20 rack quickly)
The analysis of the games is interesting. If you play console games in the US, this is what the people with the money are thinking about when they fund their next game. Mostly, its scary to me. Tie-in games are mostly crap, and I don't buy them anymore. Franchise games are a big part of the copy-cat problem in the industry, but we all eat them up because we have some familiarity with the game. Price-wise, it looks like many games would benefit from a lower price to sell more units. But the price might be firmly controlled by the console company. Free market it ain't.
One of the gems in the list was some Iraqi invasion game that was bad by all accounts, but it sold well because it came out just after the start of the ongoing conflict. It's a disgusting use of suffering as marketing, but whatever I feel about it, it sold like hotcakes.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
The list wasn't the "BEST GAMES of the last 5 years", it was "THE MOST STORE-BOUGHT games of the last 5 years".
It has nothing to do with the quality of the games, but instead what people most frequently purchase at store as opposed to online/delivery or digital download (such as EQ expansion packs).