If it was really about install base, BGS would be making board games, cause there's a LOT of tables

(high five for anyone who knows what I'm referencing lol)

That's a Todd Howard quote, so high five.

It wouldn't surprise me that the majority are on consoles, but I am quite surprised that the number would be up to 90%. Not trying to start a flame war, but I always sort of considered the pc the most suitable for the true elder scrolls experience. Even if they take mods away. Thats mostly because I started with Daggerfall and Morrowind on pc though.

Hmm. Let's see.....

EVGA Nvidia Geforce gtx 460 1gigabyte (lowest available DX-11 capable video card) $129.99 (TigerDirect)
AMD Phenom II X4 955 + Gigabyte GA-770T + 4 gigs DDR 3 bundled $306.57 (1st Choice Memory)

Less than $500, and you have the hardware to handle -any- game in the pipeline....or projected for a couple of years, at least. You -might- need to invest in a power supply, depending. But recycle case, monitor, etc, and there you have it. And you could step down to a smaller motherboard, and get the above for under $400. Drop back to an Athlon II X4, and the bundle goes down to $200 or less, and you have a drop in upgrade path for the processor, should you need it. So cost is not a real factor here. Plus you factor in the simple fact that you could build such a system, add a blu-ray player, and not bother buying an actual 'player'.....and you have just defrayed a big chunk of the computer's cost.

Consoles are attractive due to their simplicity; both usage and hardware. And they have done considerable damage to PC gaming as a whole. A lot of the companies that 'vanished' have been bought out and converted to console. Promising games have been gutted this way, as well (Drakan: Order of the Flame is a good example. The PC release had lots of promise. Then the makers got swallowed, and the 2nd game was PS2 exclusive. There was no 3rd game. And that is just one example. Look at how many gaming companies got leveraged, forced to a console model, and subsequently died).

It's frankly sad that so many potentially killer PC games are being hobbled to multi-year old console hardware and software. Any current video card less than 12 months old supports Shader model 4; the 360 only supports 1.1, 2, and a modified, partial subset of Shader model 3. Modern CPU's and OS's support multithreading and 64 bit memory addressing. Quite a few 3rd party modules support it, as well. But if the main app does not, then it doesn't matter how much horsepower you have available. I'm quite sure the console market has done wonders for gamesas's profit margin.....and that the majority of fans -of the last two games- are console based. But Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire and Redguard were there before Morrowind was more than a design document.....and won =their= fans by being what others were not. The great divide has to be acknowledged; that Morrowind and Oblivion were driven in large part by console sales. But the power and flexibility is all on the PC side of the equation. And history has shown that without that demand to push the envelope, well, the safe path becomes the only path, and uniqueness is lost forever. You buy a console you are stuck with the same capabilities until it is replaced (and games for gen 1 consoles might not work on Gen 2 consoles). Without demand for improvement, businesses tend to 'play it safe'.

5 pages and not one proof of this "90%"


Consoles sales = 5-6 million, but nothing to indicate 500k PC sales...infact only proof of the opposite. http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/10671/The-Elder-Scrolls-IV-Oblivion-Breaks-Record-Sales/

hmm....I guess TODD is including DLC sales and neglecting Digital Sales + PC-Bundles.

10% seems like an awfully low number, well below what would be considered standard for the industry. I'm not sure if what Todd said (even if it was reported correctly) was just an off the cuff comment or if its a number he knows from sales data. Either way that is an extremely low number, so low in fact I find it rather difficult to take it at face value.

It's not suprising. Morrowind was the first on a console, and brought the series to Xbox owners. There were probably quite a few Xbox Morrowind players on the forums anticipating the release of Oblivion back 5 years ago, and the success of Oblivion on the 360 and then the PS3 brought even more console users into contact with the series. Most of my current generation gaming is on the 360 or PS3, but I still have a PC for the exclusives like Starcraft II, Diablo III, and of course, Skyrim.

That being said, the only TES game I've ever played on a console was about 5 minutes of Oblivion on my friend's 360. I was honestly disappointed with the graphics, and was very glad I had gone with the PC version as I had with Morrowind.

I woiuld have to agree with you, considering that the DA2 PC boxed (hardcopy) sales alone are 23% of the total units sold (excluding digital downloads). At a minimum I would certainly hope that they are projecting more than 10% of Skyrim sales for PC.

Certainly whatever the % of units sold turn out to be PC format, the total revenue from PC sales will be significantly higher than that because there is no MS/Sony licensing fee and a lot of PC sales are digital, in which case the mfg/shipping/retailer margins are eliminated, although there is a share of revenue for Steam.

Took a bit of searching but i found some related articles.

http://www.gamesas.com/eng/news/pressrelease_041006.html States 13%. However it does say that Oblivion represented 13% off all PC game sales during the first week of its launch. Not solely the percent of Oblivion's sales.

The article from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/8704/UK_Sales_Chart_Week_Ending_March_25th.php states "second fastest selling Xbox 360 [title] in the UK this week, behind Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, accounting for 56 percent of all sales of the title compared to the PC". If I am reading this right, it says 56% of oblivion sales in the UK were on 360. That would leave 44% for the PC?

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/04/10/oblivion-records-record-sales-1-7-million-and-climbing/ on Oblivion states 13% from the First week.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/153399/47_million_copies_of_fallout_3_shipped_to_stores.html on Fallout 3 was up to 17%

Keep in mind this is FIRST week sales. As well as before Bethesda released on Steam.

VGCharts shows a total of 3.22 million copies of Oblivion sold worldwide, to date, for the XBox 360. Thats sales, I believe, not total shipped. PS3 lists 2.13 million copies sold. This does NOT include GOTY edition sales. There is no effective way to view the total PC sales market but I've got to think it's a way over 550,000. For example, WoW which is PC only has sold 12 million copies. Plenty of PC only games have sold 4 million + copies. There are individual mods for Oblivion that have over 500k downloads, some are in the 1 million range. Certainly sometimes they get more than one download per user but are we saying that everyone who every got Oblivion on the PC downloaded some mods 2 or 3 times?

Admittedly it's hard to account for how many of those people actually bought the game and how many are POS pirates who stole it.

Yes it's true, I bought 3 copies of Oblivion.. No wonder it sold so well.. hehe

NPD is actually an outdated system for gathering sales data. For the PC doubly so as it still does not count digital sales on the PC or consoles.

Remeber that NPD only gathers sales from retailers that pay to be part of NPD.

Yes I can't believe that I think all pure fans woudl buy a pc to be able to play elderscrolls properly with all maxed and use mods ....

10%...? I'm shocked hmy:

Wow... really. The growing industry-wide trend of pandering to console hardware and console audiences is suddenly making much more sense :ermm:

This.

I`ve been playing since Arena and regard myself as "hardcoe" as any fan, for whatever worth that means. I`ve switched from years of PC gaming to Xbox 360, do I care about graphics much? No. Do I care about mods anymore? Nope.
I`ll be happy to play Skyrim without arsing about with mod load orders, CTD`s and mucking around with tweaks to try and get optimal frame rate on my PC.

90% is too round a number, while I'm sure that console sales outnumber PC sales (And the few sales figures we do get show console sales slightly ahead, generally), 90% is just too round. 89%? Sure, he knows what he's talking about. 91%? Alright. 90%? It's a number picked out of the air to mean "majority", almost certainly.

Sadly i think Pc users make up about 105 of the sales and about 50% of the players. Piracy for PC games is much more rampant then with console games. It is also far easier to pirate PC games as the platforms that run PC games have far more powerful tools availible to crack games.

Gaming companies have had to either drift into console game designs OR they have had to drift towards NNOs. Pirated PC games sometimes appear on the internet before the game is even released.

I admit that my number that pc gamers make up 1/2 of the oblivion player base is pure speculation but it is based on just how rampant the problem is.

Pirate copies of PC games sometimes appear before release. Pirate copies of console games almost *always* appear before release. Piracy on console is also rampant, and piracy on PC is nowhere near the... I guess about 99.5% you put it at?
Piracy for the 360 requires about $5 worth of tools and a steady hand, and is then simply a case of downloading games. Piracy for the Wii requires however much it is to rent one of the games with security holes in them, and piracy for the PS3 requires a decent internet connection (For the discs are much larger, and often padded with junk data). None of them are a safe haven, and second-hand sales, which have exactly the same effect on the publisher and developer as a pirate copy, is rampant on consoles, and far less so on PC. It all evens out.

I think I have to agree with this one

It is still HARDER for console users to get access to pirate games.I am not implying that consoles do not have piracy. I am saying that it is far easier to do via a computer and the computer itself is the tool you use to run and aquire the pirated material which makes it very easy run pirate material. As far as i understand you require a computer to pirate most console games do you not?

no its not harder? its almost easier?

just get a chipped xbox, download the game and install it on your harddrive and you're good to go? I tihnk thats how its done on original xbox if i remember correct... not sure if its the same on 360 though but if it is, then its as easy if not easier than on pc

Sure. It's still easier than going outside and buying the game, and it's certainly cheaper. I doubt there are many people seriously put off by having to burn a single DVD. Certainly there is *more* piracy on PC, that's just an unfortunate side effect of having any freedom at all, but to imply it's an orders of magnitude difference is simply not true.

Considering it takes them five years to Optimize, it never just occured to you that maybe Bethesda reached the financial limit of their optimization options originally? You're basically saying the game's development time is doubled to look better.

Now, I'm not saying they did a great job of Optimization in the first place, but if we waited for a "Perfect game" we'd never have it, ever.

Man this is so damn sad :(... See because of the only 10% thing we wont see much focus on the PC, making more people buy it on console instead, making them focus even less on PC ect ect... svcks, bigtime.. gawd I hate this >.<

Sorry, but I call [censored] on your argument. I've had this PC for about 4 years and it is still able to play games that are coming out now on high settings. Yearly upgrades my [censored].