Gamersgate Top 10 analysis
Since we noticed it's the only place selling Pathologic in Direct Download, I found myself browsing Gamersgates websites. And it's got a last-week-sales Top 10 which is constantly updated. It made interesting reading - this is currently what the biggest games on the PC are...
Suffice to say, it's somewhat different from your common or garden retail chart.
The immediate action is to say "Well, clearly it doesn't sell any mainstream titles". But that's not right, as a flick to their Action section will reveal (Each section has its own top 10). Even in the strategy section, it's got recent hits like Soulstorm... and they're being outsold through this particular portal by the most marginal selection of of PC games imaginable. God knows how many they're actually selling, but it's still a snapshot of a completely alien PC gaming world to how everyone normally considers it. What would it to be to live in a world where that chart was the mainstream charts? Millions of Hard Historical wargames, with the first-person-shooter devotees as peripheral as half the stuff Tim Stone loves now...
It makes you think how downloadable games enable niches.
And it also makes you think if RPS is able to make a game go top 10 by having a good old rant, we probably should find it easier to find advertis(Snip! That's Enough Whining - Ed).