This kind of hits it home in terms of how full of crap some of these “PC Game CEOs” are….doesn’t it:
Despite that most sales of Sins of a Solar Empire thus far have been through TotalGaming.net (direct digital download), Sins topped the charts last month at retail for PC games.
Here are the stats courtesy of NPD:
February 2008
Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Sins Of A Solar Empire
World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest
The Sims 2 Free Time Expansion Pack
World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack
World Of Warcraft
The Orange Box
The Sims 2 Deluxe
The Sims: Castaway Stories
Crysis
Sins of a Solar Empire was released in February. No CD/DVD copy protection included. One other note, NPD doesn’t include sales at Walmart where a significant percentage of the sales of Sins of a Solar Empire occurred. Unofficial tallies we’ve received internally put Sins at #1.Thank you so much for your support!
We hope over the coming weeks and months we are able to keep the game fun and interesting for you as we continue to provide free updates based on your feedback! Free updates is our version of “copy protection”.
Things to note:
- Sins main avenue of revenue is from digital downloads…yet it still hit #2 on the PC Retail sales list.
- No copy right protection…yet they still hit the #2 position.
- They’re an independent game developer…yet they still hit the #2 position.
- It was a “small budget” operation…yet they still hit the #2 position.
What are they getting that others in the industry aren’t? Answer that and you can start your own PC game company and still be successful.
D out.
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March 18th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Well, if Wal-Mart sales of Sins wasn’t counted, then neither were those of the other titles listed.
Still, that’s a great showing. Maybe I need to buy it
I used to play those kinds of games all the time, back in the day (before EQ).
March 18th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Sins did a lot of things right. A real-time 4x game is new, but it’s a combination of familiar elements from other RTS and 4x games. The game is really well executed. The price point is high enough to avoid the stigma of “cheap casual game” but low enough to be worth taking a chance on. The game doesn’t require big expensive hardware, but it’s still quite nice to look at. They’ve fostered a good community, so word of mouth + those other selling points is driving strong sales.
In short, they recognized an under-served niche and followed through with a well-built product that was highly accessible from both a price and hardware standpoint. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work.
March 18th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Gotta love Stardock. I have been playing Gallactic Civ II for quite a long time. Sins looks like it may have been developed as an improved and expanded version of the GalCiv II concept, so there was already a potential fan base. Stardock has a habit of staying in VERY CLOSE CONTACT with the fans, just like the people over at CCP. I think the free updates based on fan feedback are a huge ingredient to their success. When was the last time you saw EA put out a free update to address concers and wishes from their fans?
March 18th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I’m not sure how familiar you are with Galactic Civ II, but some of the “Free Patches” are nearly as big as the original game in terms of new content. The same can be said for Eve. Sorry to post twice, but I had to emphasize how great Stardock is about listening to the fans and giving them everything they could ask for and more.
March 18th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
So good to see these guys getting the success they richly deserve. Another big point they had made in an interview I read (cant remember where) was how important it was to them to scale the game so that it could be played on as wide a variety of systems as possible. I run it on a 3 year old gateway laptop with an abysmal M-600 GPU and I can play the game with only the ocasionall pause as it transistions from large to small scale.
By comparison I cant even get Tabula Rasa or Supreme Commander to even start, much less play well.
That makes a huge difference for me as I have 4 kids and buying a souped up mega gaming rid from hell is just not in the budget.
Stardock and IronForge Rule!!!
March 18th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
This is the kind of information that gives me hope as an indy game developer.
March 19th, 2008 at 4:51 am
We can just hope some of them realize that gamers are very ready to pay money for value, and pirate only those things they deem too crappy to pay for. Piracy isn’t what is destroying PC game sales this year, PC games being released way before they’re done is what destroys them. “We can always patch later” doesn’t cut it, most games don’t get a second chance for a first impression.
Games that suffered from this are big titles like Hellgate: London (now nearly release quality, with the patch 1.2 just out), Unreal Tournament 3 (1.2 as well, doing many things right but there’s still some way to go till it’s a real PC game and not a mere console port), Tabula Rasa (that never got big in the first place, and the patches didn’t overhaul the game enough to keep it interesting past the first few levels), and many others. Games that failed not because they weren’t feverishly awaited, or because they had a bad base or idea behind them, but simply because they were rushed and released way too early.
And other games (Age of Conan, Turok) look like they really have to take care they don’t fall into that trap.
March 19th, 2008 at 7:26 am
jblaske said: ” very ready to pay money for value, and pirate only those things they deem too crappy to pay for”
Funny thing about the Stardock way of doing things is that they almost encourage people to copy their games and pass them around to friends. As there is no copy protection on the retail version of the games, you can make copies and share them with your friends. The free patches, upgrades and expansions are where you have to actually pay for the game if you haven’t already, and the extra content is good enough that people will buy a product key to get access to them. Galactic Civ II was far from perfect when they released it, and even had quite a few bugs. This shows that even if a game is released in less than perfect condition, it can still be successful if the developers keep working to make the users want to buy it. Star Wars: Empire at War is another example of a game that was released with terrible bugs. You couldn’t even play the multiplayer portion of the game at first, and multiplayer was a huge part of what made that game fun. Petroglyph maintained contact with the users and released patches often, fixing everything they could as quickly as possible, and that game was also very successful.
The question of piracy is kinda tricky. I think that the more popular a game is, the more people will try to find ways to pirate it. I don’t really think that having a better game will protect your game from piracy, rather I think the opposite is true. Why would anyone take the time to hack product keys on a crappy game? The bottom line is that games can be successful if they have some hook to attract customers. Whether that hook is a popular IP, fancy graphics, sex, violence, great gameplay, good marketing and product branding, great support, etc. If you’re in a dev studio who isn’t known to be exceptionally good at anything, then your chances are slim for making money.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:56 am
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