The Top 100 Best-Selling PC Games of the Century 97
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."
"Century"? (Score:5, Funny)
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Gosh (Score:5, Informative)
Print link [next-gen.biz] because, seriously, 10 words/page just so they can display more ads is annoying
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Even if a top-100 list can't be copyrighted, I'm sure that "A method for ordering entities in descending order by some measurement of success and displaying the first n entries (where n is an integer)
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If you want to produce a phone book yourself then you need to compile the information yourself. Perhaps you'll use the same sources they used; perhaps different. Perhaps some/all of these sources are themselves copyrighted and you'll need to pay a licence fee.
Makers of phone books and similar directories will sometimes insert phony entries so they can catch any competitors who copy their data.
Variety... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, some people have terrible taste...
Re:Variety... (Score:5, Interesting)
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As I recall, Deer Hunter was cheap, a simple concept, and had mass appeal. I could see my Dad picking up that game, for example, but never Quake. I couldn't tell you from first hand experience that it was a good game, but I wouldn't make rash judgements on the informedness of American markets based on the sales of Deer Hunter.
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Also, Deer Hunter was apparently terrible, it got some impressively low scores, but involved shooting cute animals for no particular reason, so sold well.
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WoW is probably selling like hot cakes, so it shouldn't take too long for it to overtake Diablo II.
Notice a pattern here? I've never been much of a fan of the genre, but you've got to admire Blizzard for doing so well.
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I must say that even though I tried to find them as hard as I could, I still have to find tentacles and scantily clad schoolgirls in New Super Mario Bros, Animal Crossing or Brain Age.
Could I know the way to get to them?
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[ wanders off with a hurt expression ]
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PC gaming has pretty much zero presence in Japan and as such including that market would be pointless. Europe is a different thing altogether, in some European markets PC games outsell console games regularly.
US only, stores only (Score:5, Interesting)
Penny Arcade summed it up pretty well I think -
"Also, when it was announced that Dark Messiah would be built using the Valve's Source engine, I said that if a publisher of Ubisoft's scale chose to deliver a title through Steam, digital delivery would quickly cease being a novelty. Well, that's happening. One sometimes hears that PC gaming is dead, and then you see something like what Valve is doing with Episode 2 and warmth spreads throughout your entire body - even if their bet is being hedged on next-gen systems. We know how good we have it. But try to find evidence of a strong PC platform at dedicated game retailers and the main thing you will find is that they have no interest in it. The games can't be traded in, and a PC gamer probably doesn't attach guides or peripherals to their purchases at the same rate, so it exists outside the philosophical continuum of their business. I'm aware that many gamers find Steam or other ethereal delivery methods distasteful, and I wonder how long they will have that luxury."
Well, as long as Neverwinter Nights 2 comes, I will be a happy gamer for a looong time.
Party games? (Score:2)
Agreed. But given that most people have the
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Half-Life 2
Publisher: Vivendi Games
Developer: Valve Software
Released: Nov 04
Estimated Sales: 680,000
Valve says they've sold 4 million copies of Half-Life 2 (here [half-life2.com]). This means the list's numbers are less than 20% of all sales. The rest was sold outside the US (as the parent pointed out, the PC is more important in Europe and elsewhere) and online. While Valve's Steam means that this is probably more pronounced for HL2 than for other games (otoh certain genres tend to do better in differ
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The 21st century began 2001-01-01. The first decade of your life's over the day you've lived 10 years, i.e. your 11th birthday. Same principle applies here.
So the correct title for the article would be "The Top 100 Best-Selling-According-To-A-Metric-Accounting-For- About-20%-Of-Sales-That's-Additionally-Skewing-Res ults PC Games of this Century-and-the-last-year-of-the-last-one." But I guess the editor shortened it.
Semantics (Score:1)
Semantics, semantics. The year 2000 vs. 2001 issue is only because we have a tendancy to call years 1-100 the "first" century A.D. And even then, it is the scientists versus general populace. As far as I've read, the same nomenclature problem (if you can call it a problem) was raised between 1899-1901. You claim the 21st century didn't begin until 2001, but I would counter ins
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This, of course, assumes that "century" is a fixed length of time. Is this actually accurate, with leap years and such ? And let's not forget that we've switched calendars a few times between year 1 and now...
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PC Gaming is dead. Long live PC Gaming. (Score:2, Flamebait)
- 1/3 "Edutainment" games
- 1/3 "Classic" Shovelware
- 1/3 Playing off of names from movies and OLD video games
- 1 MMORPG that took the PC community by storm
What's really shocking is that I can't find a single "must have" game
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More to the point, it's not a DECLINE, it's just a wider variety of people buying games, resulting in sales of games not purely based on the classic male, 20something gamer formulae. I hate the way people attribute a wider variety of people buying games to a decline..
Also, I saw at least 4 MMORPGs, and you complain about using old games, and yet you refer to the Wing Commander series and the Command and Conquer RTSes. You can't have it both ways...
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3/5th's, actually. And all the best stuff was out by the mid-90's. (Being DOS-based and all.)
I would agree if the titles on the list were all exemplary in their categories. But they're not. The Atari packages & Frogger remake are perfect examples of this. These packages were piss-poor excuses for releases, playing entirely on existing franchises without actually
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The thing is, there's no comparison here of numbers sold compared to your 90s classics. So a few games are selling well by pitching themselves to impulse buyers, and hoping noone reads reviews and the like? As long as quality games are comin
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The fifth MMO on the list is City of Heroes.
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I do have to agree that PC gaming is pretty much dead. I have an Athlon 64 with an NVidia 6600, and still, if I have the choice between PC and console, I usually take the console, despite the fact that the PC is
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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).
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Which tells you a lot about where the industry is going. Think about it. The game studios see these exact same numbers. When they find that putting out a POS like Frogger or Atari's Classic Collection nets them big bucks, which do you think they're going to invest in: The innovative games or the rehashed brands?
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I don't think it's a show of market influence though. Blizzard et al aren't dropping their current money makers for the sake of Atari re-stamps and I'm not going to pop on over the next department store to buy my g
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I think you had this gripe about how gaming was so much better "in the olden days" all thought up and probably half-written before you even glanced at the article in question. Sure the li
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So?
More sequels that cash in on great games from the 90's! Whoo Hoo! You've just, like, totally proved me wrong, MAAAAN!
Is that supposed to mean something? Halo is a run-of-the-mill first person shooter. It's big claim to fame was bringing a computer FPS experience to consoles. Considering that we're talking about PC Gaming, I'm not all that impressed.
Really? Well, this o
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Why stop at Centry when... (Score:3, Funny)
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You could... However, you'd then have to exclude all of the games from 2000 [nasa.gov].
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Been to Walmart lately?
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This is PC game sales in US shops. Why are you so suprised that PC owners other than hardcore gamers might pick up a game they think looks interesting, or young children might want to play a family friendly game like Bob the Builder?
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The PC gaming market is hitting the mainstream now, and these titles reflect that. More people that are not hardcore games are buying games, and they are buying simple, cheap games that don't take a lot of time investment, and don't require a top of the line computer. This list illustrates why everyone is frothing over the "casual gamer" market: all of these games were designed for casual games, and
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Re:Shenannagins (oblib Super Troopers quote) (Score:1)
Captain O'Hagan: I swear to God I'm going to pistol whip the next guy who says, " Shenanigans."
Mac: Hey Farva what's the name of that restaurant you like with all the goofy shit on the walls and the mozzarella sticks?
Farva: You mean Shenanigans?
Mac: OOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Thorny: OOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
[as they hand the Captain their pistols]
Wow. (Score:2)
Luckily the emulator scene is still going strong, so us PC gamers can still run lo
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Keep in mind that each franchise is only listed once on the list. GTA3 was the best selling title in the franchise on PC in the last 6 years with 420,000 units, but franchise sales were 1.1 million. So even if Vice City matched GTA3's 420K, San Andreas still sold at least 260,000 units, which beats many games on the list.
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Contridictions (Score:1)
It throws out some easily refutable numbers. World or Warcraft and it's 6.5+ million subscribers makes it the most profitable game of all time. It's shaking the game industry by syphoning off a huge percentile of money. The Sims never saw numbers like this in either sales (expansions) or subscriptions (the real money). Ever.
#7, Warcraft III, mentions starcraft as an impossible comparrison for success, and yet in the same line implies that SC didn't even make the list. (Didn't fully RTFA
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Also, Starcraft is pre2000, the list is ONLY games released 2000 or later. RTFA.
That's it, I've had it (Score:3, Interesting)
I know several people who stopped PC gaming because a) some games are released in a state that doesn't even merit the term "beta" b) Windows is so flaky, buggy, prone to spyware. Gamer does not necessarily imply technical understanding, and console's are so easy. That's why consoles sell more games.
Resale, baby (Score:2)
Also, console games hold their value much longer than do PC games.
Why only six years? PC gaming is not much older. (Score:5, Interesting)
- The various Ultima games
- The various Monkey Island games
- The individual LucasArts games like Sam and Max, Maniac Mansion, and Day of the Tentacle
- Myst
- The various King's Quest games
- The various Space Quest games
- The various Leisure Suit Larry games
Re:Why only six years? PC gaming is not much older (Score:2)
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Actually, now that you mention it, I would love to see a list that had the top 100 games of all time, as a percentage of potential customer base. That would be an informative list. Any takers?
First Impressions (Score:1)
2. 5-yr old level stuff like the sims also sells. Big Time.
3. Adventures DO NOT sell.
4. Sim-anything-economic is a sure-fire hit. Especially if it has rails somewhere in it.
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Dupe... but an interesting one (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Lego Star Wars is actually a damn fine game. It's like a "good parts" version of the prequels. Nothing beats hacking up motherfucking battle droids, on motherfucking Geonosis as motherfucking Lego Mace Windu and doing a motherfucking Samuel L. Jackson impression while doing so. "I am motherfucking Lego Mace Windu, motherfuckers. I will strike down with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to kill my motherfucking Lego buddies."
The strategy
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Bookmark this post! (Score:3, Funny)
Nice data... (Score:4, Interesting)
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Released: Nov '04
Estimated Sales: 1.4 Million
The hell? How can they use cite such a paltry number when WoW is at damn near 7 million active subscribers worldwide? 2 million in the State, alone!
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2) It does say it's an *estimation.* I believe it also doesn't count online sales. I'd bet the number is close to accurate.
3) Frankly, the researchers of the article did a hell of a lot more work than you did, so until you have another number to counter them with (talking about over-the-counter PC game sales), maybe you should just trust them.
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2. Estimation? It's a widely known fact that World of Warcraft has 6+ million subscribers. 2 of them, alone, are in the U.S. This makes it abundantly clear that at LEAST 2 million units were sold because that's how we buy them - off the shelf.
3. Oh, yes, I read it on the Internet. Must be true! (TM)
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Some people got the game from somewhere other than retail (Say, a 14 day trial they threw their credit card number into, for example), so those sales don't count in the 1.4 million. Retail sales only. Again, RTFA.
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2. The article has numbers covering *retail* sales from *brick and mortar* stores. Do you understand? Do you think it might be just a LITTLE possible that just MAYBE some people bought the game over Amazon.com or some other online site? Just because
On another note... (Score:1)
Accuracy...? (Score:2)
Command & Conquer: Generals (not on their list at all)...
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It may be suprising at first, but when you do research between those two games, it makes sense.
For reference:
- C&C, C&C:RA were initially released, considered popular (there was almost nothing else.)
- C&C:TS gets released. It was behind the times, but is good enough.
- C&C:RA2 gets released. It is suprisingly popular, and surpasses TS. It
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But wait (Score:3, Funny)
Life got an unwarranted negative description (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as introducing new players to the basics of video game using mechanics they already know it's respectable, but otherwise it's just another example of unintimidating banality equaling huge gains.
I have to disagree with this comment. My girlfriend and I happened across this game somehow and we play it all the time. You can play with the same rules as the board game or you can play an "enhanced" version with minigames instead of Life tiles. Every square shows either a still comic with one of many corny but funny captions, or an amusing simplistic 3D animation. Aside from the frills it's well programmed and bug free so there's nothing to intimidate computer noobs.
If you can find this rare gem it will cost no more than $5. Even if this game doesn't interest you, consider it an investment. It really is fun for all ages.
And for the record, this advice is coming from a FPS and Civilization gamer.
Top 100 PC games of the century?! (Score:1)