Byte vs Brick: Week Ending Oct 7
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.
(Number in brackets denotes last week's placement; - = new entry).
Steam (including pre-orders):
(-)1. Rage
(-)2. Portal 2
(-)3. Fable III
(1)4. Dead Island
(5)5. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III
(-)6. Crysis Maximum Edition
(-)7. Portal/Portal 2 Bundle
(2)8. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
(-)9. Orcs Must Die!
(-)10. Payday: The Heist
UK retail (via Chart-Track; includes etailers but does not include pre-orders):
(-)1. Rage
(2)2. The Sims 3
(1)3. Fifa 12
(3)4. The Sims 3: Generations
(9)5. F1 2011
(4)6. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
(7)7. The Sims: Medieval
(10)8. The Sims 3: Late Night
(8)9. Football Manager 2011
(15)10. Starcraft II: Wings Of Liberty
So, well done on a double-whammy there, Rage (especially as FIFA held it off from the topspot for the all-formats and console-toy charts). id might not have taken the PC version of their rather lovely shooty-drivey-shopping opus as seriously as perhaps we'd have wanted, but topping the Steam charts hardly means insignificant monies. Hopefully this will encourage them to give Rage plenty of post-launch love - I'd really like to see some higher-res textures put out, for instance.
Meantime, look at all those re-entries in the Steam chart - Fable 3, for instance, was discounted by 66 per cent over the weekend. Bit of a so-so game, but the temporarily-lowered price was right and it's been a late-in-the-day success on PC as a result.
Not quite sure why StarCraft II saw a retail resurgence - it doesn't appear to be discounted. Maybe it was a sale at one specific retailer, or growing mania for the multiplayer scene perhaps?
Oh, and I really do need to check out Orcs Must Die. It's not out for another two days on Steam, but I've been hearing very good things from early reviews of the XBLA version.