By Alec Meer on December 5th, 2011.
The year’s big guns have all been loosed now, and Christmas wallet-raiding is fully upon us. So, which games will be cleaning up on Steam and at Uk retail? Skyrim, MW3, AssRev, or another challenger? And is the resurgence of Splash Damage’s last game enough for me to justify saying ‘Byte vs Brink’?
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By Alec Meer on November 21st, 2011.
Brick vs Byte usually concerns the top ten best-selling games on Steam vs the top ten best-selling games at UK retail over the last week, but as both charts are barely changed from last week and frankly that’s no fun whatsoever to read about, we instead contacted our Future Industry Analyst Dr Ian “Ian” McGuess to provide an accurate look at what he’d expect said charts to look like thirty years hence. Here’s what his spreadsheets came up with.
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By Alec Meer on November 15th, 2011.
I’m sorry our weekly comparison of the top-ten best-selling games on Steam with the top ten best-selling PC games at UK retail is a day late. I was busy standing by the side of a motorway waiting for a tow-truck yesterday. If only I’d stayed indoors and played more Skyrim – a lesson we can all take something from, I think.
So, what will prove to be the best-selling PC game of last week? Can you guess? Of course you can.
By Alec Meer on November 7th, 2011.
Every single damn week, I can’t remember if it’s called ‘Byte vs Brick’ or ‘Brick vs Byte.’ My failing memory terrifies me. Though my girlfriend is vaguely appreciative of it, as it allows her to tell me the same anecdotes repeatedly with me having no clue I’ve heard them before. At least, she claims she’s my girlfriend; I can’t rightly recall if that’s the case or not. There’s just this person in my house who tells me to do the washing up and feed the cat, and it seems to prudent to play along and hope my memory kicks in at some point. And why are all these words tattooed on my torso?
Anyway: Brick vs Byte, our weekly, unscientific look at how the top 10 best-selling games on Steam compare to the top 10 at UK retail. What mysteries will be revealed? Will Battlefield 3 still be king of the hill? And who the hell are you people? What’s going on? Where are my trousers?
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By Alec Meer on October 31st, 2011.
Last week was a big, big week for on-off gamer-enrager EA, with the absurdly highly-promoted Battlefield 3 finally launching – but to mixed reviews, technical woes and bewildering media outlet favouritism. Was it enough to put DICE’s latest at the top of the charts? In the UK, that’s a resounding ‘yes’ – it topped the all-formats charts as well as the PC chart individually, with list-compilers Chart-Track revealing that its week-one sales exceed those of all 17 previous Battlefield games/expansions put together, and that it’s the tenth biggest-selling week-one game of all time in the UK. Crikey. And an alarming sign of how little reviews, or the lack thereof, can affect the success of heavily-marketed games. C’est la billboard-based vie.
What about Steam? Well, with EA and Valve still at quiet loggerheads, BF3 didn’t show up there – leaving the way clear for a game about a man in a tie to take the top-slot instead.
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By John Walker on October 24th, 2011.
Hello. I am not Alec Meer. He’s in charge of this, not me. But Alec is on holiday on Cybertron for a week, so I’m going to have a go. Charts, right? Like they used to have for pop music, but with games instead? I think I can do this.
By Alec Meer on October 17th, 2011.
Lists! Two of ‘em, in fact. But what do these lists do? They compare the top-ten selling PC games of last week on Steam with the top-ten selling PC games of last week at UK retail. What could we learn from them? Nothing, probably. Apart from which game companies became slightly richer over the last few days. Well done, those companies.
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By Alec Meer on October 10th, 2011.
Again! Again! It’s our theoretically regular comparison of Steam’s top ten best-selling games over the last week with the same at UK retail. Will Rage have stormed its way to the top despite the outrage and buck-passing surrounding its technically-troubled PC launch? Or will foot-to-ball have conclusively proven that an Englishman’s national sport is more important to him than pretending to be a time-lost survivor of a planet-wide apocalypse? And will retail be a mess of Sims games while Steam is a confusing muddle of pre-orders, deeply discounted returning titles and new entries? Take my hand. Where we’re going, there be tables.
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By Alec Meer on October 3rd, 2011.
And again! A not entirely industry-representative yet unquestionably fascinating/depressing look at what comprised the top ten PC game sales for Steam compared to UK retail over the last week. Will The Sims’ dominance of retail continue unabated? (Obviously). Will there be any surprise returns to the Steam top ten? (Yeah, actually). Read on to find out the answers to both these questions and more, as long as those questions concern the chart-placing of contemporary PC games. If you want to find out the answer to what the Queen had for breakfast this morning or where Muammar Gaddafi is hiding, I really cannot recommend reading the rest of this post.
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By Alec Meer on September 19th, 2011.
Time for another one of our in theory regular but in practice highly irregular comparisons of the last week’s top ten best-selling PC games on Steam, and at UK retail. Obviously there are all manner of ways in which these are not fair or entirely meaningful comparisons, not least in that Steam’s metrics can tend towards the cryptic, that Steam’s includes pre-orders but UK retail (via Chart-Track) doesn’t and that it’s laughably hard to find many PC games on British high streets these days, but it’s always fun/horrifying to get a flavour for the stark differences between what people are buying digitally and what plastic boxes their attention is caught by.
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By Alec Meer on June 27th, 2011.
I KEEP saying I’ll do this regularly, but something about numbered lists makes me curl into a tiny ball and weep for mother. Anyway, let’s do it this week and maybe I’ll be a better boy again next week. Here’s the top ten best-selling released PC games on Steam last week, in comparison to the top 10 at UK retail. As always, there are some verrrry interesting variations, which have much to say about both Steam and retail’s own peccadilloes…
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