Unreal Tournament III for the PC Sinks, While Crysis Aims High

By Joe Haygood | December 14, 2007

Looking over the NPD data this week, there were two PC games of note that were on the charts. They did not rank up at the top as I doubt the PC will ever see million copy sales again, unless all console manufacturers quit the business. But it was interesting to see the respectable numbers of one of the titles and the dismal numbers from the other title.

Unreal Tournament 3, a franchise that started on the PC and has always catered to PC fans was trounced at the register. In 11 days on the market in the US, the game only sold about 34,000 copies. This is a rather ugly number for a franchise that was given life by PC gamers in 1999. Unreal Tournament 3 was a game that looked to get back to basics and bring the fast and furious play that was found in the original game. Epic has to be looking at these numbers and is wondering what the hell happened. Granted, these numbers don’t count Walmart or Digital Downloads, but seeing how the local Walmart has stacks of Unreal Tournament 3 available and the game is not on Steam, it is a low number for the franchise.

Was the game a victim of its own success, or just bad timing in a crowded market? Some have stated that it could of been the demo, which did not meet with the expectations that gamers thought the game was going to be. And while the graphics look good, it is not of the quality of a Gears of War, and a lot of that may be because of bandwidth issues. It will be interesting to see if the numbers are just because of a short month or if it is truly a bust. Epic will also be looking at the PS3 version to see if it sells the same way or if it becomes the leader in sales.

Crysis on the other hand hit one out of the park with sales higher than projected, selling just shy of 90,000 units. This was a game that I thought would have limited potential at the checkstand, because of the high system requirements that people had to have to play the game with a lot of the bells and whistles turned on. It is a good sign that in just over 16 days, the game sold this many copies, and great word of mouth and positive reviews, the game looks to break the 100K marker soon, if not already.

Demand was high at most outlets and stores around the Southern California area were selling out of the title, which is always a good sign. This is a game that could garner a lot more sales in the next six months as people finish a hardware upgrade cycle, with the new motherboards, CPU and Graphic chips coming on deck.