John Carmack: PC Sales Aren't What They Used To Be
Tom's Hardware, the site that coached me through cobbling together my first homebrew rig over a decade ago, quizzed John Carmack yesterday on why id Software has its sights trained on consoles with its upcoming shooter Rage.
"The ground truth," replies Carmack, "is just that the sales numbers on the PC are not what they used to be and are not what they are on the consoles."
You can almost set your watch by what id Software gets up to when it comes to PC gaming, though Doom 3's 3.5 million record sales (for id Software, anyway) are fractional compared to franchises like Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, and all of Nintendo's sundry Pokemon and Mario games.
PC gaming looks increasingly asymmetric of late. It's a platform with an install base hundreds of million strong, reduced to less than a handful of gaming bestsellers in recent years: The Sims (70 million), Lineage 2 (14 million), and World of Warcraft (13.5 million).
But after those, sales drop dramatically. Age of Empires sold some 3 million copies, but Age of Empires 3 only sold 2.5 million. Half-Life sold 8 million but Half-Life 2 only sold 4 million. Even The Sims 2's extremely respectable 20 million in sales plus expansions are a shadow of its predecessor's.
And where today's console majors like Halo 3 and Gears of War are hitting figures like 8.1 million and 4.7 million respectively, critically-acclaimed PC games like Crysis and Civilization IV are only selling 1.5 million and 3 million respectively. If you look at the top 20 all-time PC games in terms of sales, they're all either The Sims, one of the big MMOs, or games like Diablo, StarCraft, Myst, and Populous -- entries from another era.
Carmack says it's hard to second guess what the reasons for the decline in PC sales are.
Certainly, piracy is a contributor to that. I also think a lot of the people that bought PC games have bought consoles and are happy with them. We still think the PC is a market worth supporting, but we're not making decision around the PC. It's probably more of the junior partner in the cross-platform strategy, although obviously, our day-to-day development is predominately on the PC.
So will Doom 4 be console-exclusive?
Says Carmack: "I would be stunned if we did not do Doom 4 for the PC...it would just be wrong."
In the meantime, I guess we're just waiting for the number crunchers to get their arms around online PC game sales, so we can put claims that PC gaming's unsung sales triumphs are happening direct-digital through the crucible.
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Its amazing to me people blame everything on piracy because it requires the thoughtless answer.
There are two reasons why. 1)lack of new and interesting content vs what people have already invested in and 2)no requirement to buy new games since the old games work perfectly fine on the same hardware.
If you bought a game for playstation, you have to rebuy the newer version for PS2, and again for PS3. I have a pc and I still play Civilization II and it works perfect on my XP machine. Not only did I buy CIV II like 10 years ago when it came out, but I bought CIV IV and I still like CIV II better.
I used to work at Babbages in the 80's/90's and there were hundreds of new and interesting titles a year. Plus, even if there were version upgrades (Ultima III, IV, V) for instance, there were huge upgrades in quality and capability. Unfortunatly now all the games are the same just with different skins.
continued.
Why would people, with reduced constantly reduced income because of the lousy economy, spend 50$ on a game when they can get Americas Army for free vs COD4.. or Archlord a perfectly capable MMO, instead of $ a month for WOW. Is WOW better than Archlord, sure it is... but I can afford Archlord.
Additionally, now companies offer fully playable demos of the games so you can see how bad they are before investing 50$.
To compair farcry sales to Crysis isnt even in the same league because Crysis was horrible. I completed the game in less than 3 days.. all for 50$. It was obvious it was rushed out the door to be the first DX10 game, which it wasnt.
What happened to games like F15 Strike Eagle III, Falcon 4.0, Gunship, Double Dragon, etc. PC games sales are poor because they are all the same, either an FPS or an MMO.
Give us something worth buying.
I just got through reading one of many articles in recent months about how the PC is the most popular gaming machine. Now John C. comes out and makes this statement, seems like there is a disconnect somewhere.
I think if we could get past the glitz of video card madness, the PC is still the better platform.
In the citations I did not see STALKER mentioned. I think that it was one of the better games on PC in a long time. The PC will always be my preferred platform.
Atually the decline in PC gaming is this. First of all most companies promote console games. Second, even the most expensive console is only 600 dollars while I just recently built a gaming rig with the best last generation equipment capable of playing all the games I've thrown at it. The cost was $1,200. And that wasn't even the best hardware. So you can get an xbox 360 for under 300 that is guaranteed to play any title that comes out for the platform. Until PC gaming is standardized or PC hardware is to the point that even your grandma's eMachine can handle Crysis or Age of Conan. I don't see the majority of "gamers" spending their time or money on PC gaming. Although there will always be the PC gamer's (myself included) who will play a game on the PC instead of the console (such as Call of Duty 4). Funny enough, I play CoD4 on PC and my roomate plays it on the xbox.