WoW has 11.5 million subscribers; that's better than 11.5 million copies sold.
Considering we are talking about sales, I would imagine that the sales of WoW are the important factor to compare sales by
WoW has made more money than any console game on that list.
Yes it has, and that is a rather large portion of the point I was trying to make. The reality of the PC market is that nigh all of the real money is now in MMOs, not shooters RTS or any other genre really.
Bested by 30 million??? I think you're confused again. Wii Sports has sold 40 million copies, because in most countries it comes with the console.
I'm not confused in the slightest. You buy a new vid card that comes with a game- it counts as a sale for the publisher of the game. It appears you may be a bit confused on how sales are counted. If Windows offered their bundled games as stand alone titles and packaged them up as such, they would be counted that way too. This is how the industry works, you will have to take up their issue of tracking with them, they made the rules.
PC CPU's are far more powerful than any console CPU. You should have read the article Anand wrote about the pathetic performance of console CPU's, before it got pulled.
That was one of the funniest articles I have ever read, I will say that. Anand displayed a rather profound ignorance of the console market with that article, he assumed that console devs used high level APIs that would have considerable trouble extracting peak performance from the architectures- he was also mistaken to think that multithreading applications was incredibly difficult and that developers wouldn't get on board with that for another decade. The assertions were laughable at best. It is good in retrospect that he pulled the article when he did as even the fairly low grade coders used for normal PC development are having no problems extracting parallelism from their code- hell nV and ATi are showing useage for thousands of concurrent threads- Anand very shortsightedly implied that going beyond 2 was a staggering technical hurdle that would take an immense amount of time to clear.
Put Linux on a PS3 and see how bad it sucks at most tasks.
My PS3 obliterates my quad core running F@H or any sort of heavy FP task at all. Not a little bit, order of magnitude range. Can't run word processinig or general purpose web code for crap, would probably get destroyed by a P2 400 running Sysmark, but for very FP intensive uses that lend themselves to SIMD architectures without a lot of data interdependance the console CPUs bury PC CPUs. Of course, these types of results can only by seen in a handful of types of applications- scientific computing, media encoding and... what was the other one... oh yeah, games. Funny how that works, a multi billion dollar company with hundreds of the top CPU engineers in the world could figure out why their CPU design would work after several years, and work splendidly, for the application they were using it for while Anand's armchair analysis couldn't. The console CPUs can suck horribly at every type of code in the world except gaming(which is almost true) and that doesn't change the fact that they are significantly more powerful, still, then PC CPUs at gaming.
The largest 3rd party publisher is Activision-Blizzard and their number one money maker is PC games.
The largest of the little guys is Activision Blizzard and they make the overwhelming majority of their profits from MMO subscriptions. Exclude WoW and they aren't in spitting distance of EA. Not saying that WoW isn't a perfectly viable revenue stream at all(despite my hating what they have done to the game lately)- quite the contrary- I think that is where a lot more money is headed for PC game development.
The 2nd largest is EA Games, and PC games have been their 2nd largest money maker.
So out of the top 5 one of the publishers make most of their money on a MMO, and the smallest of them makes the second most money on PC games. And this is a testament to the strength of PC gaming?
What? You're using VG Chartz total world sales of Wii games since the Wii came out, to inaccurate NPD numbers representing only retail sales in one country in one year. How does that up?
Cherry picking, does that work? You posted estimated world wide revenue of PC gaming, I posted actual sales data. I was using VGCharts to get people away from the idea that selling games in the quantities that the PC does is anything close to good.
NPD numbers are inaccurate. NPD even says their numbers represent a shift to digital distribution, and not a decline in PC gaming sales.
I'm not saying PC sales are declining, haven't once. I've said their share of the pie is shrinking, which it is. Exclude MMOs and PCs are in very, very poor shape at the moment. Not trying to say MMOs aren't perfectly valid, but again when the overwhelming majority of a platforms profits come from one type of game, and the majority of losses come from every other type of game, as a publisher, what do you do? This shift is already happening, Epic and id now have the consoles as their lead platforms, Blizz and Bioware are deep into MMO development(EA is backing Bioware heavily)- these are the types of things I'm talking about.
Divide that by platform. There are 6 console platforms currently being developed for. You can't compare the PC to the combined sales of all 6 different platforms. Divide those up and the PC has a fair share of the market.
OK, so I guess you are thinking along the lines of the PC being as viable as the PS2? Or are you equating it out to a handheld?
A popular game on the PC can outsell any console except Nintendo's.
Let's see some numbers then. Since you want to exclude Nintendo and its' plethora of titles, let's remove WoW, Sims and Myst from the PC side. Now let's see those PC titles that outsell, say, COD4- a third party title for the 360.
Nintendo is the biggest hit this generation, and as far as I can tell it hasn't caused 3rd party developers
It has
NOTHING to do with developers, it is about publisher funding. It doesn't matter what the developers want to do if they can't get the development for it funded.
I can see new Nintendo gamers eventually crossing over to the PC, but I don't expect many PC gamers would drop PC gaming and go exclusively with Nintendo.
Tends to follow a fairly cyclical pattern, young kids- consoles, slightly older kids into early adulthood- PCs, adults- back to consoles. One of the biggest and most important drawbacks PC games have right now is that they are all trying to be an experience, and very few of them are trying to be fun. Don't get me wrong, their is certainly a place for both, but their is a place for both.
Edit- Forgot to mention, over half of the titles on the Wii(and DS for that matter) that cleared a million units so far are third party. They aren't the monster hits Nintendo has, but there is very clearly plenty of money to be made on the Wii by third party publishers. The Wii also has at least one third party title in spitting distance of 7 million units sold. Not trynig to change the dynamic of this end of the conversation, simply pointing out that while I am fine with you trying to ignore the Wii, it isn't because I think you are on the right track saying it is only Nintendo titles that make money on the platform.
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