There was so much hype on this game, how has done sales-wise?

It's been in the top 10 since it was released, so I suspect it's doing well.

I don't know if you can judge a game this way, maybe just its community, but the B&W message board seems to be dying a very boring death. I don't know if you can draw a connection between sales and a dead message board, but I would bet in most circumstances one would influence the other.

In an effort to clean up the area around my computer, I just threw out the box for B&W. Before I did, I took a good look at what was actually on the box and realized that other than, "You're a god, you have a creature, you can create miracles, you can be good or evil." It doesn't really tell you anything about the game or how it's supposed to play. Ok, I guess that is a lot to tell, but distilled down like this, it doesn't sound like much. It sure makes it seem like they were just relying on the hyper-hype to sell the game.

I d/led the patch and probably will give it a second chance in a few weeks.

I'm just glad I got it on sale.

You threw out the game box? Sacrilege! ;)

- Alan

Well, I look at it this way: The hardcores who are watching the game in development and constitute the initial weekend's sales figures fall into 2 groups: Those who are there waiting with their wallet, and those who await the initial reports from their friends before buying.

B&W probably got both groups, because everybody has a few days worth of "wow factor" when they first start playing. By the time you get to mission 3 and realize the truth, you've already done the word-of-mouth advertising for the game you thought was great up to this point.

The "trickle sales" mainly come from people with Compaq's sitting on their desks. These are also the folks who keep good games like "RC Tycoon" on the chart forever. Your wal-mart gamer. They're still picking it up, mainly because it looks different from everything on the shelf that's 1st person or whatever - and it has that same initial "RC Tycoon" impression about it, with the bonus of also "virtual pet" appeal.

Well, put me into whichever group you want, because I haven't bought B&W yet -- probably won't, unless I can ever find it dirt cheap. Otherwise, I'll pass altogether.

One of the old game sites, maybe Gamecenter, had a much more useful way of reporting things. Thy'd list the games, then have other columns showing how many units were sold, and what the average price point was. It let you see right there just how well everything was doing. I think they even had a special chart every so often that showed how many units had sold at what aggregate price point over the life of the game. I thought that was great. When I see a regular top-ten list, it doesn't mean much to me. Did #1 beat out #2 by one unit or one hundred thousand units? In a slow release time, number ten might be hardly selling, but there is is.

An article in, I think it was USA Today or NewsWeek (someone else brought it to work) was about The Sims and B&W and God Games in general, and how they're pulling in new gamers.

They had sales figures from PC Data. The Sims has sold over 4 million units this year, and over 3 million expansions. (!!) Rollercoaster Tycoon sold over 300,000 units THIS YEAR (it's a 1999 game! Who's left to buy it?). It was about 100,000 ahead of B&W.

I don't know how well B&W is doing in the rest of the world, but I think it's maybe safe to assume it has sold somewhere in the 300-500,000 range internationally.

I saw that article too in the paper at work. I think it said that B&W had sold 300,000 copies since release.

Found the article in question online:

USA Today article about 'God Games'

The related story article titled "'God game' designers play good and evil" has some quotes from Peter Molyneux and Will Wright.

I saw this too. And I'd just launched a tirade
about how lousy mainstream coverage of computer
gaming is - then they go and publish something
interesting and coherent. In USA Today at th