KingsGambit said:
The Comfy Chair said:
Exactly, hence why we know concurrency rates, and how 14% is physically impossible due to concurrency rates. Tell me how 280k players can be playing skyrim on PC at once in the first week most of the time when Skyrim only sold around 7m copies in that week. What you're saying is that at any point during the first week, one in three people who owned skyrim on PC were playing it. At any point in the day. That's an insane number of people considering timezones ect.
If we (roughly) scale it with, say, xbox sales of CoD and that concurrency rate (CoD on 360 will have higher playercount/sale ratios due to more 12-18 year olds so it's a good low estimate, as Skyrim will have a lower concurrency rate than CoD 360 so the 'multiplier' will be higher), Skyrim will have sold around 3-4m copies on PC making it around 30-40% of sales. Which puts it in line with most revenue reports for PC gaming. It's really strange that considering it's what we see in financial reports. Very strange indeed.
I don't understand what this is about. The 280k concurrent users [http://www.vg247.com/2011/12/16/skyrim-ships-10-million-units-worldwide-sets-steam-record/] is from Steam's stats and happened on launch day. Bethesda have verified that as of 31/7/2012 they've sold 10 million copies of Skyrim. 59% of those sold units were 360 versions, 27% were PS3 versions and 14% were PC versions. It doesn't get much clearer than that. This poll suggests PC gamers outnumber console players by almost 4 to 1 yet they buy 6x more games than we do. This poll is not representative of gamers or gaming, and I've never seen any evidence that there's a PC playing majority on this forum either. Not even a majority, an overwhelming majority. I can't say that any clearer.
Where is the quote from Bethesda which says 14%? that's just a retail statistic. It was 'verified' because yes, it is correct, for retail. PC gaming has been primarily (i.e. majority of games sold) digital for years now.
Also, that 280k concurrency lasted for near enough a month (at worst it was usually around 200k). If it was a momentary blip i wouldn't take much stock in it would I? I did also mention a time frame in the previous post, implying that number was maintained. The concurrency rates blew portal 2 out of the water, by the way, and portal 2 sold around than 1.5m on PC in that time period afaik (oh, and before you go to vgchartz and say 'but it sold nothing!', it was confirmed by Valve to have sold more than the console versions - proving just how bad retail is for gauging PC sales). So apple to apple comparisons, and common sense application of the numbers. You can't beat that by quoting retail stats that are known to be flawed by everyone.
The issue with PC gaming is that these stats aren't shouted out everywhere, so investors and people who simply don't do much else than listen to random retail stats think PC is much smaller than it is. It's very depressing considering i can find all the info i need to make it very obvious to anyone (who doesn't have a underlying motive to be determined that the stats 'must be wrong' for whatever reason), and i don't get paid stupid money for doing so. Maybe i should become an analyst rather than a programmer
Also, there's a PC majority on near enough every game forum that's multi platform that i've ever been on. PC gamers use forums more. It's a really simple trend that has been shown many times across many polls. I don't know why you find it a big deal! It's well known that console gaming has a LOT more players who play 'AAA' games but aren't THAT into the gaming scene beyond buying the game, putting it in their console and playing. PC gamers, by the very fact they put the effort into building/researching/buying a PC have a tendancy to be more into the gaming scene as a whole. It takes more effort to have a PC, so you put more effort into your hobby on average.
That doesn't exclude console players from doing so, but people heavily invested into gaming, enough to post on sites like the escapist, tend to also heavily invest monetarily into their hobby to get the best experience where possible (which is usually a good gaming PC and the consoles with exclusives that interest the gamer). It's the same as any hobby.
That's why on every forum (except specific console ones) there'll be more PC Gamers, because the PC community is a more active one online. That has nothing to do with sales. The reason you also don't see a ton of PC specific threads is because we're gamers first and foremost here, we're about the games. Platform isn't a massive issue when you own a PC and console anyway, so most PC gamers are pretty cool with the whole platform war thing, since a good number of PC gamers have every platform they care about anyway.
I hope that has made things clearer for you. The forum activity is not linked the sales, and the sales themselves are more than retail statistics would lead you to believe ever since digital took off around half a decade ago. Add those two major factors together and things don't seem so strange. The reason why it seems 'wrong' is exactly that! it IS wrong
If the PC sales were correct then it would have made more sense in the first place to you.
P.S. By the way, yes, that 'TheComfyChair' account needs to be deleted, i managed to finally get this one back after finding out the info for it
