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 Digg.com Facebook Google Bookmarks N4G Gamerblips del.icio.us Reddit Slashdot.org StumbleUpon NO paradaz in ps3 forum for a while then. I went to a lot of different game shops today and no one had The Sims 3 in as everyone was given allocated stock. They said give it a month or three. Does this make it the biggest Mac debut then? :D But on the other hand, sales now drop after about 3 weeks, and the games go on budget within 6 months.
In the late 90's you never had huge day one ship outs, but you had nothing on budget ever - or when budget labels did start, they never got a PC title for a year or even longer.
It's why you quite often have to spend large amounts on auction sites for PC games from the 90's, because you haven't got 1,000's of Sold Out and PC Gamer and other budget label versions available, only the original titles.
So don't let this false marketing fool you. A PC game today (Sims and WoW excluded as they are one-off's) can sell 400,000 in the first week (if it's heavily hyped) and yet only sell 500,000 overall before it goes on a budget label. Hit PC games in the late 90's sold 50,000 EVERY WEEK for 9-12 months and then maybe started appearing in bargain bins at around 15 months.
So today's million seller in a week might look great, but back when games publishers were ran by people that were gamers and were closer to gamers(and the gaming media was too), they understood 3 million sales over a year is better than 500,000 at full price and then another 1.5 million at Ł9.99! I don't think the sims suffers from that. Both versions have sold close to 20 million and at near full price for a chunk of its life. But if my memory serves me correct there was loads of budget games about in the mid 90's for PC. There was the White label range as well as Kixx and so on. Personally i think titles these days are tending to have longer shelve life than ever before. The lack of game from the 90's is in part due to the fact that people tended to throw things away back then, where as now we keep them and sell them on ebay. That and disk weren't as stable as todays storage mediums. My copy of monkey island died a couple of years ago :( @Osiris25,regarding Kixx, that was Commodore 64 games your thinking about there. The mid 90's was the end of the C64 tape life and disk started taking over, floppy then CD.
As to the Sims - didn't your read that I said exclude that title, as in every industry there are one-off's that because they cannot be replicated by other companies easily become a classic that cannot be repeated and therefore ends up with a monopoly.
I disagree also that today we keep our games for ebay and back then we threw them away. We may have thrown away the boxes, which is why you see so many CD plus manual sales of 90's games, but there price is not always just about rarity but about a bigger demand for them in a world of 10 million plus DOSBox downloads. I have a few Kixx games which are for the PC still in box in my garage. I think the large downloads for dosbox and want to play these games is in part due to nostalgia and also they are people who haven't seen played these games but will always hear them mentioned and listed in best ever game lists so want to see what all the fuss is about. I think there rarity comes to fewer sales to a smaller market in the 90's than we have now. The market today is bigger because of the likes of Wii and DS, but just regarding PC game sales, the market is 40% smaller than 5 years ago!
In 1998 8 PC titles sold more than a million units just in the U.S. In 2008 2 PC titles sold more than a million GTA IV and Fallout 3.
So generally, the market is bigger, within that the PC games market has marketedly shrunk in terms of number of AAA PC titles released and consequently number of titles sold.
If less PC titles are on show in retail stores, and there are not dozens of AAA titles available for download only to make up for that,the number of games beingreleased must be smaller. | 
