Doom 3

[OB1]

This is probably the closest I'll ever get to getting an admission of anything from you... so it's nice to hear... As I said from the beginning, I have better knowledge of this because I've been looking at PC sales lists for years. You hadn't before you talked about PC game sales. Oh well, you should know better now...

Anyway, OB1, FPSes have a much more limited appeal than The Sims does. Can't you understand that? Sim games (SimCity, The Sims, management simulations like ____ Tycoon, etc) have very wide appeal. Almost everyone likes them. Fewer people like first-person games where you shoot people. And since the PC gaming industry is the one with the largest userbase, obviously the games with the widest appeal have a better chance of making top-10 lists. So PC charts will have a higher ratio of casual-to-hardcore games -- everyone has a PC, after all, and only people who want to play games have consoles.

If you go back and look at that 1998 list, you'll see that the PC market has always had a large percentage of casual titles.

But really, I'd say that the biggest thing that showed that you hadn't actually looked at many sales lists wasn't forgetting about casual games. It was forgetting about strategy games. RTSes show up on these lists almost as frequently as FPSes do, after all, as those lists show, and your forgetting them was surprising... MMORPGs are usually games that just show up for a little while every so often, like adventure games do whenever a Myst title comes out (unless it's a Blizzard MMORPG of course... WoW is selling amazingly well...), but RTSes? They're pretty much always in the top 10 and are probably a close second to FPSes in terms of sales and popularity on the PC. Saying that FPSes are a 'vast majority' of hardcore game sales is a massive misrepresentation of the facts... even when we ignore the fact that seperating 'hardcore' from 'softcore' games can be tricky when the 'softcore' ones are also great games, like The Sims or SimCity are.

Of course there have always been great-selling casual titles. I never contested that. What I've said from the beginning of this debate is that FPSs are the best-selling games amongst the more hardcore PC gaming crowd. I said that two pages ago and I'm saying it again. I've been completely consistent with my opinion on this. The reason why I brought that up was to illustrate my point that PC gamers do not care about new and innovative gaming experiences like hardcore console gamers do. You will never see games like Katamari Damashii sell as well on the PC as it did on a console. And as someone who can only make games for the PC in the foreseeable future, that worries me. I want there to be a market out there for different kinds of games. That fact is made even more difficult by the fact that most PC gamers don't want to get gamepads, and making different kinds of games for the kb&m severely limits what you can do.