What were your favorite communities to talk about starship unlimmited?

A recent issue (it may have been the January issue---its at home and I can''t check it now) had a list of the best PC game sales from 2000. It also had some highly acclaimed games that did not sell so well. NOLF was among them. I thought the number was closer to 100,000----maybe 80,000? My memory could be failing and I could be wrong. The numbers in other posts here just looked a bit low to me compared to what I remember seeing in the article. Monolith had a booth at the job fair at GDC 2001, so I guess they''re hiring.

Do you consider The Sims a good game? The Sims and its expansion pack brought close to $100 *million* (not a typo) in revenue. I think it was well over $70 mil for the game and around $20 mil for the first expansion pack.

This is quite a rare accomplishment, though, especially for a PC game. Marketing was good for The Sims, but it was not marketing alone that sold that many copies. It was a good game----for the masses and profitability.

According to www.bwgame.com, Black & White already has 250,000 registered players, around 1 month after the game arrived in stores. Hard to say how many players have unique and legitimate paid-for copies.

If it took $70 million dollars to *make* Shenmue and Final Fantasy IX, shouldn''t Sega and Squaresoft expect to recoup their investment. I think the recent Final Fantasy games are expected to sell several million copies at $40 or more each, so revenue will be really nice. Again, quite rare, although these are console games.

I realize some of these statistics aren''t generally useful, but it does show what sometimes happens.

Graham Rhodes
Senior Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.

Well, I despise PCG, though I still get it occaisonally. I didn''t see January''s, and I''m running from memory. So I''m probably off...but it still sold horribly.

At the other end of the scale is Derek Smart''s Battlecruiser 3000 AD. That game (horrible as it was, it wasn''t his fault) was butchered by Take-Two. However, he''s to blame for over hyping it like mad. Same with Daikatana.


BTW...Derek Smart is a cool guy. I never knew a game developer like him...

I checked last night and it was the April issue of PCG. My memory was wrong. NOLF did indeed sell only about 36,000 copies *in 2000*. NOLF was released in November last year and so that 36,000 is basically sales for 2 months. I realize that most games sell most of the copies in a very short time following release, but perhaps that 36,000 will ease up somewhat over time. Still poor sales, though.



Graham Rhodes
Senior Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.