PC Games Are Not Video Games
By 
Hib in
features on
December 28th, 2007
Video games are big business these days, piling success on top of success. It’s just a shame that games exclusively for the computer don’t qualify.
Go ahead, scream for a second and get it out of your system.
I missed this when it first popped up a couple of months ago, but Forbes has an “In Pictures” feature up on the ten best selling video games. You’ll notice, however, that there are no PC-only titles listed there, nor in the accompanying story. Of course, that’s not too out of the ordinary…as a general rule, console games do sell more copies than PC games. However, you do have to wonder where games like World of Warcraft fall into this.
The games on the Forbes list range from 8.6 million copies sold down to 5.3 million (for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2), and yet neither WoW nor The Burning Crusade (which, according to Blizzard, sold 3.5 million copies in its first month) are mentioned.
Of course, if you go by the list at VGChartz.com, you will find WoW…at number 20. Of course, their top game is Super Mario Brothers, with a listing of 40.24 million copies sold, so that’s understandable. But the Forbes list only has two games released before 2000, so apparently theirs isn’t a list of “all-time best selling,” just “best selling by our own mystery criteria, known only to us and a few monks in a temple in Tibet”.
Why do I even care? Because I passed being sick and tired of computer games getting the short end of the promotional stick quite some time ago, and seeing a list like this from a respected outlet like Forbes that doesn’t even make a passing mention of any computer-only games horks me off.
Of course, we should probably be thankful. If too many “journalists” started digging into computer gaming, they might wind up with a case of the crabs.
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December 30th, 2007 at 11:32 am
The people who make these lists are either ignorant or biased. I’ll always consider “video games” to cover console and Pc.