stnicralisk
Golden Member
- Jan 18, 2004
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Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
As far as the games are concerned, I'll hold off comment and hope that both of them are incredible. Sales wise, it is unfair to line up a console title to a PC title. For reference-
Electronic Arts has announced that The Sims, the virtual-life game created by Will Wright and Maxis, has sold more than 6.3 million copies worldwide to become the best-selling PC game of all time. The previous record was held by Myst, the graphical adventure game released by Broderbund in 1993.
Link. This was from a while ago, but just framing relative sales. HL has since passed Myst and is currently in the ~8Million copies sold range(though I can't find that release ATM).
And for general sales-
Overall, 2003 U.S. sales of console games totaled $5.8 billion (186.4 million units) while computer games accounted for $1.2 billion (52.8 million units) in sales. Total game software sales in 2002 were $6.9 billion, with console games bringing in $5.5 billion in sales and computer games accounting for $1.4 billion. (Note: The numbers released by the ESA today do not include sales of game hardware or accessories.) A record nine console games sold more than one million units, and all were rated E or T. Thirty-nine console games sold more than 500,000 units and 83 exceeded the 250,000 unit barrier. Comparable numbers for 2002 were six, 33, and 73, respectively.
Console games outsell PC games close to five to one.
To this day Super Mario Bros. 3 remains the best-selling video game of all time never bundled with console hardware, having sold 17.28 million copies.
Link.
Seven different Mario platformer titles(not including MarioKarts) outsold the second biggest PC title of all time. That's just one franchise(these numbers are somewhat tainted as there was a limited run of GBs that came with Tetris while that title for the GB sold some 33Million copies in total).
It isn't fair to compare HL2 to Halo2 in terms of sales. The only prayer HL2 has is if relatively speaking noone buys Halo2- that's not going to happen. Halo2 will obliterate HL2 in sales, but that is simply a given if you follow the markets at all.
Edit-
Don't forget StarCraft sold over 28million copies and still counting. I cannot find a linky to a sales counter but I am sure Half-Life sold close to there if not more.
Perhaps it was 2.8Million copies for StarCraft? I posted numbers above and you can check around to verify them if you like. No PC title ever has hit close to 28Million in sales, although multiple console titles have surpassed that number(if you include bundled titles anyway).
quick google yields this from the blizzard site
Q: How many copies of StarCraft have been sold?
A: To date, the StarCraft franchise has shipped over 7 million copies.
of course I dont know if that includes starcraft 64
Edit: I would also like to anger everyone by saying that Halo was boring a repetitive with huge textures and bland environments (even using the same mapping over and over!) - HL had an interesting story but it hardly revolutionized the industry it had a number of good scripts... thats about it really... I didnt like either of the original games much at all
Halo 2 has horrible... horrible... graphics.. the models ive seen in the screenshots look polygonish!
HL2 looks good at least.
I will play my friends copy of HL2 - I wont bother with Halo 2. IMHO Marathon was their best achievement.