Space Sim Sales Figures

[Menchise]

Not much info, but I thought it might be interesting.

Lancer News

If I'm reading it correctly, then BC3K 2.0 was the #3 selling space sim of '98.

*thumbs up*

[Põdi]

Interesting (and rather surprising) that Descent Freespace sold nearly twice as many copies as Freespace 2.

[Supreme Cmdr]

Even with NPDs error margin, it is still inaccurate. BC3K v2.0x sold about 2x those units. Which is in fact why EB picked up the exclusive rights.

Besides, Lancer probably got those figures from a post that Desslock made on the Usenet on 01-18-2002 in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.space-sim thread.

Here are some snippets. You can find the entire thread on Google if your use the advanced search and then use desslock as the author, battlecruiser as the word search and in the forum above.

quote:

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I really wonder why the genre's been so thoroughly abandoned by gamers, but

it's really hit the skids over the past several years, but it's a pretty

recent development:

Descent Freespace (Freespace 1 - a 1998 release) sold well, as did the last

Wing Commander (late 1997) and X-wing Alliance (early 1999). XWA outsold

the other two by a large margin. But the genre's had one successive bomb

after another since then, and each release seems to do worse than the

others. FreeSpace 2 did, in retrospect, o.k., but sold less than half the

units of the original game. Allegiance, Tachyon and Xbeyond the Frontier

only sold a few thousand copies (Interplay's re-release of Battlecruiser

3000 did better than any of those games). Starlancer did a little better,

but it was still a big commercial flop. And Independence War 2 and Jump

Gate both sold very, very poorly in the U.S., even though they were both

good games.

Hopefully they did better in other markets (like the U.K., in IW2's case, in

particular) Games developed in non-U.S. markets tend to do better in

non-U.S. jurisdictions, understandably enough.

Desslock

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quote:

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Sorry, the spacing got kinda monkeyed up. Hopefully it's clearer now

(below)

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Desslock's RPG News:

http://desslock.gamespot.com

New Gaming Industry Editorials on Fridays

1997:

X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter (Balance of Power) 333,608 units ($15,333,000)

Wing Commander Prophecy (and gold) 210,000 units ($7,110,000)

1998

Descent Freespace (Freespace 1) (and gold) 147,158 units ($4,563,000)

Freespace expansion pack (alone) 23,000 units

($404,000)

(so approximately 170,000 units and $5,000,000 for Freespace 1 in total)

Independence War 61,000

units ($2,210,000)

Interplay Re-release of Battlecruiser 3000 41,037 units

($405,000)

(I don't have any figures on Take Two's original release, although Derek may

be able to provide them)

1999

X-Wing Alliance 235,920

units ($7,457,000)

FreeSpace 2 (including game of the year) 83,484 units

($2,703,000)

Independence War Deluxe 23,000 units

($487,000)

(so approximately 84,000 units and $2,700,000 for Independence War and its

expansion)

2000

Tachyon 61,200 units ($2,112,000)

Starlancer 27,390 units ($1,147,000)

Allegiance 12,700 units ($443,000)

X-Beyond the Frontier 10,834 units ($295,000)

2001

Independence War 10,069 units ($407,000)

I can't find Jump Gate's stats for some reason, but as I recall it sold less

than 10,000 units.

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