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#1 and #2 in the charts for first week
wondersmith
Member UncommonPosts: 27
The NPD Group's top 10 PC games chart is finally out for the week of HG:L's debut (week ending November 3, 2007). Here are the results:
1. Hellgate: London
2. Hellgate: London Collectors Ed
3. Half Life 2: Episode 2 The Orange Box
4. Age Of Empires III: Asian Dynasties
5. The Sims 2 Bon Voyage
6. Nancy Drew: Legend Of The Crystal Skull
7. Flight Simulator X: Acceleration
8. World Of Warcraft
9. The Witcher
10. The Sims 2 Deluxe
I know, strong first-week sales don't guarantee long-term success. I just thought the chart interesting to us MMORPG fans--especially WoW's (relatively) low ranking and Burning Crusade dropping off it entirely!
Comments
I wouldn't call WoW's ranking low since it's been out a few years. The fact it is still the 8th highest selling game for a week is really impressive. Also I'm not surprised HG:L sold that well during the first week. I would be surprised if I saw it rated at all now.
Brace yourself for a surprise, then. HG:L is currently #6 on Amazon.com's PC games list, updated hourly. So chances are at least fair-to-middling that it'll still be on the top 10 when the NPD group releases the chart for this week's sales. Indeed, it seems more likely to me that WoW won't make that chart, if its current position at 19th rank on Amazon is any indication.
When I referred to WoW's position as relatively low, I meant relative to its former steady performance as a perpetual chart-topper. In the last several weeks its position has declined with surprising speed, but I'd be a fool not to agree with you that its past achievements have been phenomenal.
I have been following Amazon numbers and they look similar to what you have posted. Do you have to be a member of NPD?
Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you can walk.
I first started seeing the NPD Group's charts in computer magazines a couple of decades ago, if memory serves. They seem to be a widely recognized standard for retail sales rankings for computer software (and lots of other things). Here's the Wikipedia article on them: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPD_Group
They create a weekly "top 10" list, and a monthly "top 20" list. Unfortunately, I've had trouble finding consistent sources for these lists. The source I've been using lately is www.gamedaily.com/news/biz but, alas, it shows only the latest chart, no historical data. Look down the rightmost column to find the most recently released PC games list. Right now it's a "top 20" list for October, on which HG:L ranked #2, and the collector's edition ranked #9. Not bad for a game released on the last day of the month!
Good news for Hellgate fans!
Yeah, I'm surprised HG:L is still selling well after the bad reviews (although I think not totally deserved). Maybe HG:L won't get hurt as much as I thought it would.
It's a combination of good pre-launch PR, good word of mouth, faith in Diablo developers and addictive gameplay.
The past couple months have seen an amazing number of top notch releases, so for any game to do as well as HGL now is impressive.
But longevity is important for a financial model involving a subscription plan. While I seem to be quite addicted now, games that did review amazingly well like Bioshock/Halo3/GuitarHero3/CoD4/etc is going to pull my interest all too soon.
Excellent stuff. I think we'll see a lot of movement in the sales charts until early January though, with so many new titles coming out and holiday sales and all. Hopefully Hellgate will do well, thought I'm personally struggling a bit with getting thoroughly into it so far.
No Tabula Rasa, I notice...
Hellgate:London is a great game, however, it still has much work to be done. Now, it was released practically unfinished, but they have already stated the reasons for that.
Now, this game is pretty much the first of it's kind. Yes, there have been MMOFPRPSG, but nothing of this big. This is the first BIG company with BIG game designers to have done this. I hope this game works out great, even though I'm waiting for Huxley personally.
This game will more than likely fail eventually once Huxley comes out. Hellgate:London has had many downsides to it, personally, and that will help the creators of Huxley(hopefully)to not make the same mistakes.
The problem I see though, is Huxley is created by a Korean company and they are known for repeatitive grinding, which makes MMO's not fun.
The only downsides of Hellgate:London, is the obvious rendering glitches, networking errors, and a few more misc. things that are really annoying bugs. Probably the main thing I DON'T like about HG:L is the fact every instance looks too much alike and the quests are very repeatitive and boring. The only thing that keeps me going is getting the nice loot, which is 1 of the 2 things that kept Diablo 2 alive(the other being PvP).
But, as for the sales doing great for HG:L, I think it's going to hurt them. The game has so many glitches right now that they are desperately trying to fix and the game is selling very well right now so it's going to throw a lot of people off that bandwagon. =(
Lol HGL will be lucky to have anyone playing it 1 year from now .