For those of you that think consoles may have hurt the game:

After 3.4 million copies sold(two days)

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim sells over 3.4 million copies at retail (not including digital sales) in its first 2 days on sale.

Up over 600% on Oblivion's modest 490k staggered opening across PS3 and X360, Skyrim will manage to outsell Oblivion as a whole in a matter of weeks. 59% of units were sold on the X360 (over 2 million copies) and 27% on the PS3, with 14% on PC.

As you can see, pc comes in dead last. XBOX first.

Bethesda is not a stupid company. Do the math. How much more money did they make by releasing it on consoles?

PC gaming is way to expensive for most gamers. I changed to consoles because I couldn't afford the constant hardware upgrades.

The reality is, there is much more money to be made in consoles, then in pc gaming.

Do you have a source for these numbers?
I didn't know steam released any sales numbers

If I could choose between making a successful Facebook, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, or PC game I'd probably make a successful Facebook game. The cost it would take the make, coupled with the huge audience is just amazing.

But honestly that doesn't surprise me that Xbox ranks first. They have the largest fanbase and generally push a lot of their games through marketing.

Here ya go:

This is where the numbers came from:

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/88459/skyrim-sales-exceed-34-million-units-in-two-days/

Of course there is more money to be made in console gaming compared to PC gaming. 33% of the gaming market is PC users. That's still a big chunk of gamers. I'm a console player too. I've been on and off in PC gaming.

The question is are they PC exclusive? There are 4 consoles out right now and I'm pretty sure that the Wii and Xbox 360 hold at least 60% combined which would leave like 10% for the PS3. The problem with that stat is how many people game on a PC, PS3, Wii, and handhelds like me?

While this is but a RPG title, it makes one wonder what the numbers are for 1PS'ers and the like? (I'll bet fairly simular)

Everyone who plays on a gaming PC loves to demoan "consoltitus" but the reality is that the lowest common denomonator is the average PC.

When it comes to the kind of graphic processing that games require the average off-the-shelf PC or laptop is underpowered. My 2011 i5 laptop won't even load Skyrim, let alone play it.

The "generic" PC install base dwarfs all the consoles combined. PC sales also dwarfs all consoles.

So game sells for the PC platform might be low but the potentual is HUGE.

well, I think its thanks to consoles sales that we are still getting games...

These statistics always seem to ignore download purchases, so invariably represent PC gaming as more niche than it actually is.

Nothing new with this, most say PC is the best for Skyrim ( not saying it isn't ). But as for the population is concerned about this, Xbox will be the most cooperative gaming system on the market. Bethesda sees Xbox as a forerunner to than import, who wouldn't want to pass up a huge amount of money to work exclusively on one system first? The fact to say, " Lets do the PC version then import to the others", wouldn't work to well for the main profit ( Xbox ). Great example of the profits that would be lost is to look at PS3, the import to the console didn't work so well. Just imagine if that failure happen to the Xbox? That huge sales would flop before you realize something went wrong.

Plenty of PC only titles say otherwise.

I didn't really expect any other result than what was stated by the OP to fair though.

But deos it make any of us, myself included, feel good about that fact that games are becoming less a labour of love by the developers to more of another cash cow to the publishers?
Ultimately we are all the ones that will suffer while some git like Bobby Kotick for example will get the cream.
All those nice things shown in the Game Jam video may have made it into the game if the devs were left to their own devices, but 11-11-11 had to happen because the moneh man wants paid.

Bingo. Valve does not report sales figures. You're missing a good chunk of the equation there, especially given that Steam has 3-5 million concurrently active user accounts at any given time of day. Their total number of registered accounts is well over 35m at this point. (I think. They had a press release a few months back with figures, but I forget what they were.)

Also, factor in that Skyrim has consistently been in the top ten of the "top sellers" list on Steam since it came out (it's at #3 right now, in fact, three months after release--it's very unusual to see a title that doesn't have "Call of Duty" in its name doing that well)...even during the big winter sale. That's a whole lot of PC sales right there.

I'm pretty sure Skyrim also set a new all-time record for most players concurrently playing the game a few days after it came out. Something like 280,000 players were playing the game simultaneously within the first two days of release. Now, keep in mind that that also doesn't account for all the people who play the game in offline mode, and that that was a snapshot of a single point in time. Every owner of the game across the world was not simultaneously playing the game at that moment. That's just a small chunk of the playerbase.

PC gaming is most certainly not too expensive, and most certainly not dead last. You're looking at very biased sales figures.

Edit: Corrected the record number. It was http://videogamewriters.com/skyrim-sells-more-than-3-5-million-copies-pc-mod-remove-spiders-29579 concurrent users, not 230,000.

Yeah but cant you get at least a close approximation to he DD sales from just the steam user numbers?


Pc gaming is more expensive simply due to the hardware requirements that keep increasing. Consoles have remained static in HW requirements for years while the same games on PC require more and more technology JUST to play it. I mean just to look at GTAIV's minimum PC requirements in comparison to the consoles. The facts are that developers keep adding more and more settings and data to a game for the PC version that gamers keep expecting with more and more reqirements needed to run it.

And thats not even counting the plethora of problems that gaming on a PC can have.

Dont get me wrong I game on both my PC and my console, but I know its easier and cheaper to play on the console. Its nearly impossible to get a PC to run a game with the equivalent settings to the consoles for the same price, it just doesnt happen. Quality GPU's alone cost a shedload.

idw, were you around when the playstation (1) came out?
most of the good games were there, like metal gear solid, gran turismo, final fantasy VII and VIII.
if final fantasy hadn't sold that much on consoles probably we will never had it on pc

Well...actually, terrible ports aside, the fact that consoles' hardware has remained so static means that for the most part, PC hardware requirements have remained decently static as well. Most recommended requirements for PC games that also have console releases still cite a Core 2 Duo or an older Quad Core at most, and a 5xxx-series AMD card / whatever the Nvidia equivalent is.

I'm still doing just fine on my old Core 2 Quad 9650 CPU, nearly three years after I bought it. I'm honestly not worried about upgrading it until the new console generation comes out and pushes everything forward again.

Yeah, the hardware is expensive. My PC was $1.5K all together (including a monitor, UPS, etc), plus throw in another $300 for the new GPU I tossed in there last September. Maintenance has been another $400-ish thanks to a PSU and a HDD going south at once. But those are very infrequent purchases/costs. I'm not upgrading or even doing that massive kind of maintenance every year. That's been in the three years since I bought it.

Plus I think Steam sales balance out the hardware costs. Hardware is more expensive, to be sure, but I also can't remember the last time I paid more than $15 for a game. The average is more like $5-7 per game for me. With console gaming, I think it runs the other way: cheaper hardware, but you're also paying $50-$60 for games on average.

Wii beating the ps3..you need to get your numbers right.

There a lot of gamers that cant or dont take advantage of steam sales, like myself. I dont have any means to pay for online purchases, I dont have a credit/debit card (by choice) and there isnt anywhere local that I can take advatange of putting cash in to a Paypal account so that means I buy retail for everything. The thing with that though is I am a canny shopper and I tend to get a lot of games on sale or pre-owned if possible reducing costs considerably in most instances. So you still can cut the cost of console gaming down to a level where its almost on par with (f not better than) PC game prices. Like I got Space Marine new for 360 for ￡17, Just Cause 2 for ￡12 new, BFBC2 & SC conviction pre-owned for ￡14 and ￡16 respectively.

Of course buying new titles on release is more expensive but I can justify that to myself BECAUSE I get those bargains in most cases.



Im pretty sure that the Wii consles have easily outsold PS3's worldwide.

Been around since the ZX81 mate, proper old fart gamer.
Went from Saturn to PS1 and those were proper quality titles I agree, but the PC would have had it's own top quality titles at that point too.
MGS1 was on PC and I had MGS2 on PC as well, now I play MGS3 with an EMU and it's the same game with better graphics. Did play it on PS2 and PS3 for a while as well.

I also own a PS3 BTW, I am not a PC elitist as I enjoy games purely for what they are and not what they are on.
I tend to stick with PC though as it offers more options and customistation over the consoles, as well as the obvious performance boost if you spend the money to get it.

Remember, before consoles there were Personal Computers (ZX80, ZX81, ZX-Spectrum,C64,etc,etc) and before them there were consoles.
The story has always been the same though, the consoles were limited by what they could do and PC's tended to offer more diversity. At a price.

The circle of gaming goes on and on.

then you know, if it wasn't for consoles, gaming would be almost dead...
I started with the Mattel Intellivision, Commodore 64 and Spectrum too btw

Mate, thats what people think but its just not the case. WoW alone has more people actively playing it than almost every other game on sale, regardless of what you or I think of the game. There have always been titles that draw gamers to one system or another. No one platform is resposible for keeping gaming alive, its the biggest growing entertainment industry there is.

Oh and btw I started gaming with a binatone pang console.

WoW came out in 2004, I was referring about the mid-90s...
at those times no one gave a sh*t about PCs, gaming reached greatness thanks to super nintendo and genesis first and later thanks to the playstation.
if it wasn't for those, there would probably be no WoW.

(btw, you meant PONG, right?)

I believe that PC games drive the industry (hardware, too) because they are constantly breaking ground and pushing the limits. The PC platform and culture encourages this. I think the process would be slower if we only had console gaming.

One assumption I noticed this thread makes is that every PC gamer has a "gaming PC." Of course multiple graphics cards and the top-of-the-line CPU and RAM would drive up costs, but I for one don't play that way. If games didn't exist, I would still need a reasonably powerful PC for the day to day things I do. Streaming HD video, editing, even just browsing the internet these days. So automatically I (and I assume many other people) would be shelling out for an at least moderate PC. Gaming only increases the cost by a little for me, because on top of what I would configure normally, I now require at least a decent GPU. Amortize that cost over the 3-5 years that I typically keep a PC, and it really isn't much at all. So for me, the difference in cost is maybe $100-$200 over a 5 year period. It would cost me more to upgrade to the latest XBox every 5 years, I think.

If money is all that matters then why do you not have any? Surely, for someone who thinks that money matters should you have plenty of it and not need to make excuses for not having a PC.

yeah, in the present day that's pretty much it, PCs are better.
back in the 80s-early 90s PCs svcked, bad
if you were looking for good games like sonic or super mario world you had to go to consoles, the only PC platform games I can recall atm are Duke Nukem 1 and 2 and Jazz jackrabbit, not good stuff.
PCs were mostly oriented on simulators and RTS, this until the first Doom came out, that's when pretty much PCs made the quality jump.

Consoles are great there are just certain games that lend themselves infinitely better to the PC. Any FPS game and games like Skyrim are so much better for PC it isn't even funny.