The subject of the poor sales of Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 was bound to come up during this year’s GDC. In the first few weeks Crysis only pushed 87,000 copies off the shelves, with UT3 doing even worse: 34,000 copies.
Such figures are small when compared to console hits, but apparently Rein has an explanation: PC games are long distance runners, unlike their console equivalents:
“NPD numbers are an estimate. We don’t know what they are exactly but if you sell 80,000 a month for 10 months that’s a multi-million seller worldwide. Who’s going to complain about that? We’re in the internet age and people react to numbers they don’t understand. It’s funny, after that I spent a lot of time going through long-term NPD numbers. I actually went and looked all the way back to 1995 and I dissected all the shooters. The path we’re on right now isn’t going to make it the fastest selling game but PC games have a potentially much longer tail than console games. There’s a good chance to sell that game for a much longer period of time than the more hit-oriented console games.”
Rein may be right or he may just be looking for a way to defend the turf he loves the most. Either way, it’s a good thing to have someone less eager to praise the console realm.