Top ten games for Windows

I read the "Exploring Windows" newsletter from Microsoft, because it sometimes has interesting tidbits. In the last edition I discovered that Microsoft is running a page on their website listint the top ten games for Windows sales chart of three weeks ago. With links to the game's and the publisher's websites. Handy!

Of course that makes sense for them, even if they end up promoting other companies products over those from Microsoft Games. They even have a game advisor in cooperation with Futuremark, which tries to find games which actually run on your machine, if you don't have the latest hardware. Microsoft is mainly in the business of selling Windows, and an operating system is only as useful as the applications running under it. It is perfectly possible that the long-held claim of Mac owners to have the superior operating system is true. But few people buy Macs, because PCs with Windows just have so much more software running on them, especially if you consider games. Amazon lists 6869 PC games and 942 Mac games, and in Europe the ratio is even worse (5206 PC vs. 277 Mac on Amazon.co.uk). So by promoting games, Microsoft is automatically promoting Windows.

The top 10 list on my newsletter lists an astounding 4 MMORPG in the top 10 for the last week of September: Expansions for Everquest and Everquest II, plus World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. The website is two weeks further advanced, and mid-October there are only WoW and Guild Wars left in the top ten. Expansion sell quickly, it seems. World of Warcraft being on rank 3 in both tables shows how well Blizzard managed to stay on top. Lots of people are leaving WoW, but lots of new players are arriving at the same time, so there is not visible drop in subscriptions. Guild Wars is slightly less well placed, ranks 6 and 8 respectively, but still quite good for a game several months old. People leaving WoW, and not actively playing Guild Wars any more, form a pool of potential customers for expansion sets of these games. I think expansion sets for both games will sell rather well. I just wonder why Blizzard needs 2 years to get the first WoW expansion out, surely hiring more people to get one expansion out per year would have been both financially better and more popular with the players.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:12 PM Permanent Link