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Guild Wars Exceeds 2 Million Units Sold

The combined sales of Guild Wars and its follow-up, Guild Wars Factions have exceeded two million units sold worldwide to date.

Publisher NCsoft also announced that the NPD Group recorded Guild Wars Factions as May's number one-selling PC game for North America. It also topped the charts in Europe that same month.

“As a top seller for GameStop and EB Games, we watch with high interest how this property continues to make a stronghold for itself in the marketplace," said GameStop's Bob McKenzie, senior VP of merchandising.

The original Guild Wars launched in April 2005, and Guild Wars Factions launched on April 28, 2006. The subscription-free MMO is developed by Bellevue, Washington-based ArenaNet, a subsidiary of NCsoft, and is available for play in Korea, North America, Europe, Japan and Taiwan.

By comparison, Blizzard's subscription-based World of Warcraft reached 6 million players worldwide in February.

Spiderman 2 the Movie made $360m in box office receipts during its first month in the US, and 36 million people saw it. In stark contrast, the game made $20m in its first month in the US, and sold a meagre 405,000 copies.

Total direct sales: 3,050 units (in the year since release)

Income:
Asteroid Miner
- February: US $17,97
- March: US $5.99
- April: US $29.95
- May: US $23.96

Starship Tycoon
- February: US $619.62
- March: US $671.58
- April: US $599.63
- May: US $621.64

Democracy (You might also want to check out the previously published Democracy sales stats)
- February: US $5206.76
- March: US $4,253.83
- April: US $3528.38
- May: US $5916.80

Since then, the company has garnered considerable success with the relaunch of the Tomb Raider series in Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider: Legends, which has now sold 2.9 million units worldwide on all formats. The more recent Hitman: Blood Money has also performed well, according to the firm, with 1.5 million units sold in Europe and North America.

The inaugural episode is still a retail bestseller, and while Lombardi declines to give numbers sold via Steam, it’s worth noting that for the original Half-Life 2, which sold four million total units, an estimated 1 in 4 were bought and distributed over Steam. It’s safe to assume a similar ratio will obtain for the episodic version.

The Steam Numbers
Total Steam Users: 8 million total, 5 million active (last 30 days)
Sales: Unknown for Half-Life Two: Episode One
Half-Life 2 sales via Steam: 750,000-1 million @ approx. $49.95 each

20 Million Dollar Failure

The launch window picked was close to perfect: December 17, 2002, just in time for Christmas, virtually assuring millions of sales. In-house predictions called for an ongoing active subscriber base of up to 1 million people, but The Sims Online launched out of the gate and promptly fell flat. Six months after launch, Wired reported 125,000 retail copies sold and 97,000 active subscribers - not bad, but not enough to justify the game's $20 million budget. By April, 2004, their subscription rate peaked at around 55,000, and has now stagnated near 35,000.

All of these small transaction fees add up - Habbo Hotel had $30 million in revenue last year.

53 million Habbo characters have been created and close to 7 million unique users worldwide visit Habbo each month (source: Nielsen Netratings, June 2006). The service is available in 18 countries.

Next-Gen.Biz has ranked the top 100 games of the PlayStation 2 / Xbox / GameCube generation based wholly on unit sales. Analysis includes revenues, average review scores, commentary, spin-offs and more.

Here are some notes on how this list works.

* Stats, ordering and research: thanks to game publishers, retail analysis sources and NPD data.
* Games are ranked purely by units sold. This tends to favor games released earlier, rather than later, and games which have spent a long time at a lower price point have also done well, but we wanted to reward longevity and popularity across all audiences, not just hardcore – a particularly important criterion for the large child-oriented sector of the handheld market.
* For the Pokemon and Super Mario Advance series, only the top selling SKU is represented on the list. This was to prevent these two franchises from choking the upper echelons of the list – apparently, people buy a lot of them.
* This list is for the U.S market only.
* This list only features games released since the introduction of Game Boy Advance, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo DS.

Brain Age Sales Top 4 Million Units
Nintendo's Brain Age for the DS has sold four million copies worldwide, exhibiting the widespread appeal of a well-executed "non-game."

So far, 600,000 units have sold in the Americas, 3 million in Japan and 500,000 in Europe, according to Nintendo. The company describes the game as the "cornerstone" for its pick-up-and-play Touch Generations brand of games.

Another smart title in the Touch Generations catalog is Big Brain Academy, which consistently appears in the top 10 DS sellers on Amazon.com's sales charts and has sold over 250,000 copies since its June 5 US launch. Nintendo launched Touch Generations in late May, a brand which also includes titles such as Magnetica and Sudoku Gridmaster.

The success of games like Brain Age bodes well for Nintendo's Wii strategy. The company's upcoming console will cater to the same gamers who are attracted to pick-up-and-play games.

Nintendo of America VP of marketing Perrin Kaplan told BusinessWeek in June, "One of our goals was to target people entering the game world for the first time. It's absolutely about tapping into emerging markets."

Major publisher and developer Electronic Arts announced that it has already sold an estimated 2 million copies of Madden NFL 07 since it was released on August 22, a new all-time record for the veteran sports franchise.

The game is currently available for the Xbox 360, Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube, PC, Nintendo DS and PSP, with versions for the Wii and PlayStation 3 planned for release later this year alongside each console's respective launch.

If accurate, this would make the latest entry in the 17-year old franchise the best selling version yet, up a full 12 percent from sales of last year's release, which saw sales of 1.8 million units over the same general period.

"We are proud that Call of Duty 2 is the first title to sell over one million units on the Xbox 360 in the U.S."

GENERAL INFORMATION:
Title: Pharaohs’ Curse Gold
Developer: Ancient Soft
Release date: 2002
Team size: 1 developer, 1 artist and 1 musician
Time of development: about 4 month part time
Platform: Windows (Mac, Linux versions planned)

SALES:

* Downloads: 1500 monthly
* Direct Sales: 4-15 units monthly
* Affiliate sales: 1-2 units monthly (not regular)
* Price: USD 19.95

EXPENSES

* Music USD 19
* Graphics USD 350
* Hosting USD 100
* Download.com Ads USD 99 (in 2004)
* Shareware Tracker USD 59

PROMOTION
- Submitting to shareware sites
- Download.com

Marble Blast Ultra sold for 800 MS points and Tunnell noted that the game was close to 120,000.

Casual game biz poised for growth despite non-paying customers

It's got a business model that's drastically in need of repair, which may be one reason why the casual games audience is spreading like wildfire. Indeed, because the typical casual game comes with a "try before you buy" offer, fewer than 2% of those played are actually purchased. Conversely, that means that 98% of casual gamers are playing for free without a cent going to the games' developers or publishers.

Still, sales of casual games -- small, downloadable video games with simple rules that make it easy for a mass audience to begin playing almost immediately -- have skyrocketed from practically zero in 2002 to over $600 million in the U.S. alone in 2004. They're expected to top $2 billion domestically by 2008, according to a white paper prepared by the International Game Developers Association (click here to download PDF of paper).

While Jason Kapalka didn't invent casual games -- that honor goes to Microsoft with its Microsoft Solitaire which came bundled with Windows as early as 1990 -- he has had a lot to do with its growing popularity. In 2001, he created "Bejeweled" which has sold 10 million copies, spawned countless "match three" clones (so-called because the goal of the game is to create a line of three identical pieces), and is available on nearly every platform, including cell phones, PDAs and in-flight versions, with a slot machine adaptation on the way.

As chief creative officer and a founder of Seattle-based developer and publisher PopCap Games, Kapalka has also designed nearly two dozen of the company's hit titles, including "Zuma," "Bookworm," and "Chuzzle."

Lucas Arts dropped us a line pointing out that their Lego Star Wars II game, out for one week, has already sold more than 1.1 million copies across the eight platforms it was released on.

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--With over 500,000 units sold since its launch in 2005, the LUXOR franchise is one of the most successful brands ever in casual gaming. And now, MumboJumbo is pleased to announce the launch of LUXOR 2, the much anticipated sequel to the #1 casual game of 2005.

Sales Statistics: GL Golf, Over $28,000 Total Sales
Title: GL Golf (Download for Mac :: Buy)
Developer: Nuclear Nova Software
Released: March 2004
Time of Development: 5 months part time as a hobby, plus continued improvement since the release, maybe 1-5 hours a week
Platforms : Mac OS X

About development:

I developed GL Golf as a hobby to enter into the uDevGames 2003 contest. It won Editors Choice and received lots of positive feedback. I decided to improve the game and release it as shareware, and I was amazed by the sales. It took about two months to get the sales up to the average rate, but for over two years I have maintained a steady income. This is mostly due to constant updates of the game, at least once a month. I’ve added several new features to every patch, and the version today looks like an entirely different game than the one released in March of 2004.

SALES
GL Golf

* Price: US $15
* Sold 641 units
* Total: US $9615

GL Golf Combo

* Price: US $25
* Sold 645 units
* Total: US $16125

GL Golf Expansion

* Price: US $10
* Sold 263 units
* Sales: US $2630

Total sales
$28360 over two and a half years. Average monthly sales - 43 copies of GL Golf or the Combo pack with a total of $945 a month.

Downloads
Total Downloads - 85,000 + downloads from sites OTHER than Apple.com.

I don’t how many downloads Apple.com sends me, I actually need to setup a simple counter on my website to count the number of downloads the send me. I am estimating it to be a large number, possibly 25,000-50,000

Jake continues:

I mostly used these five sites - apple.com, download.com,
macupdate.com, versiontracker.com, and macgamefiles.com . They
probably send me 90% of my downloads, and are 100% esential to ANY
mac game.

EXPENSES

* Contracted course maker’s commission - $2,640
* Affiliate Sales - $265
* eSellerate and Plimus Commission - $2,836

Tips to other developers.
As told by Jake Leveto:

* The casual game market is perfect for small shareware games. My target audience is adults, most of which aren’t hardcore gamers.
* Update often, adding new features and fixing bugs. Golf is a perfect example of a game that can be improved very easily, and it is much easier to update a game than to make a new game from scratch.
* If possible create an add-on (expansion pack) for an extra cost, the course pack
accounts for around 1/3rd of my revenue.
* Listen to your users, ask for feedback. Most of the features I’ve added to GL Golf have been suggested by owners.

Future Plans

Continue improving GL Golf and my other two games. Due to college I don’t have the time to program a game from scratch, and Its much faster and easier to keep working on GL Golf. I would love to have the game ported to Windows, because all of the sales above are only from Mac users. I may have time to do this in the future but I am considering paying someone to do it for me.

GameProducer.net comments
I think GL Golf is an excellent example of a successful indie game: made part time, continously upgrading it, steady sales. Big congratulations to Jake at Nuclear Nova Software for sharing the numbers and tips. Good luck with the sales!