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

By: George

George — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:37:32 +0000

I would just like to point out that while NPD does not receive data from Wal-mart, they do attempt to account for Wal-mart sales. They actually survey thousands of Wal-mart shoppers to see what they bought, and extrapolate Wal-mart sales based on those survey results as well as other demographic information they have.

So, it’s kind of a myth that NPD doesn’t count Wal-mart. Just because Wal-mart doesn’t give them the data doesn’t mean the data can’t be collected by other means.

By: morphiend

morphiend — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:13:52 +0000

I think another factor is that Crysis is not available on other platforms. So the numbers for UT3 will definitely be hurt by being available on other platforms and gamers waiting for their respective version. As I’ve been telling my friends, its sort of unfortunate, but the PC is a dying platform for gaming and these sales kind of show it. I wonder what the sales on consoles will be compared to the PC.

By: Joe Haygood

Joe Haygood — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:40:41 +0000

True, a week can make a big difference, but 50,000 copies? I have to wonder if it was a game like Quake Wars, that just got lost in the shuffle of so many games.

Advertising for the game was minimal at best.

By: Paul Munn

Paul Munn — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:12:07 +0000

Crysis launched 11/13 Tuesday and UT3 launched 11/19 Monday. Six more days, including a weekend, was in Crysis’ favor.

It’s hard to tell what the install base is for a game like Crysis too but the strength of those numbers really is surprising. I’d fully expect the UT3 engine to scale a whole lot better than the Crysis engine would, but that’s just because Epic’s been developing for PC for eons, not because I’ve actually tested them or think the Crysis developers can’t do it, too.