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Valve releases Half-Life sales figures
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 4th December 2008
The original Half-Life has sold an average of 1 million copies every year, for ten years, without counting Steam.
Valve has today issued it's sales figures for it's games catalogue as it sold in stores (I.e. these sales figures don't count Valve's own distribution platform, Steam) and the results are absolutely astounding. Ready?
The original Half-Life, Valve's first game and one of the most critically lauded PC titles ever, has sold an average of one million copies every year ever since it was first released in 1998. That's an average of one million copies per year, for ten years, without counting digital sales. Wowzers.
Half-Life 2 meanwhile, which was the first game to launch predominantly on Valve's Steam service, has sold more than 6.5 million copies in just four years and is still clocking up retail sales. The Orange Box has managed to sell 3 million copies at retail ever since that was released just last year and Left4Dead is currently on track to beat that record by more than 500,000 copies.
A lot of the success of the original games has obviously come from the fact that both Half-Life games got excellent mod support from the start - but that only proves that you don't need to be Valve to make money off the PC. While Counter-Strike began as a free mod for the Half-Life engine and the developers later joined Valve more than 4 million people bought the standalone Counter-Strike package which doesn't come with any other games. Again, without Steam.
Just to prove that you don't need to be all shooter-riffic to make some money from the PC too the sales figures for Garry's Mod were released recently too. The game, which is essentially a Lego-kit for the Half-Life 2 engine, has made the independent team behind the game more than $3 million in sales in just two years, though that figure only counts Steam sales.
PC gaming is dead you say? Pfft. We can't wait to see the sales figures that include digital sales, how about you? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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CoD4, though it was one of the most pirated games ever apparently, I bet still sold a phenominal number of copies.
HL is what, ten years old now? A million copies a year isn't a bad sales trip.
That said, I don't see why they feel the need to tell everyone it's popular, when in most cases people are already aware of this?
Seems like Valve are just trying to inflate their testicle size.
While all the other publishers are thinking console only, valve and Blizzard are sitting back and develops for the PC communily and keeps that slice of the pie all to them selves.
Great sales tactic if you ask me.
GO VALVE!
And I agree with above. Good game = good sales figures.
;)
Well, in PC gaming, if Valve wasnt being successful, no one else would.
And they were selling it for 99c the other day... If that's still going on it might be worth it, I bought it just because... well why not? I do have a box copy as well somewhere but for 60p you may as well have a nice shiny steam version too...
Nah - more likely they're trying to present a different side of the story to the whining devs/pubs who say that PC gaming is dying, piracy is the cause, yadda yadda... when in reality, at least half the reason why the games made by those developers and publishers are doing so badly is because they're not very good games. They can be technically good in one area or another (usually graphics) but unless they hit the right balance of everything... they don't do too well in gamers mindsets.
Piracy is bad, no doubt about that... but devs don't help their own case when they release sub-standard rubbish then complain that it didn't sell well.
To be honest, I didn't really like Half-Life all that much at the time. It was made, later, by a great SDK and awesome mods. But even vanilla it's way better than some of the dross I've seen in recent years.
98 cents actually, to celebrate its 1998 release. I bought a copy for everyone on my Steam friends list who didn't already have it.
Crysis much? :D
But agreed. Its become something of a scapegoat for poor sales figures generally.
...
who was that again?
A lot of game companies would be happy with a million sales total
Agreed - it was great while the dollar was in the toilet, but now that its a bit more on an even keel the price of new games on Steam is a bit of a rip-off - Left 4 Dead for example at release was $49.99 + VAT - which worked out at about £40. Doesn't really match up against the £20 I paid for it from Amazon and the only cost to me was waiting a couple of extra days to play the game (which since it was during the working week wasn't exactly a problem for me). In saying that though, Steam is still great for older games, especially with the weekly offers :)
Plus steam rules and I said that from day one.....even when it took me 24 hours to download counter-strike 1.6 lol
Why do you hate Steam? I have well over 30 games on it and never once did i have a problem. Except for when a damn tornado took their HQ down. Even then it was back online the next day. And the features are awesome. Like gift purchases.
YOU!
But m'eh, I just play it without Steam. Or on my Steam press account.
Besides, you let me play HL2 on your (then) better PC, so I think we're even. ;)
It is awesome though =D
Part of it I imagine is frankly also imagining that the best that you can do is the same as the best that anyone can do. There are some VERY talented people at Valve.
If they get any bigger, they'll blot out the sun!
I think you used to be able to get it straight from the garry's mod site, gmod9 I think you could. Maybe be wrong.
I bought the orange box from tescos for £15. I would have already had it on steam for ages but I don't have a credit card, and refuse to get one just for steam.
OKOK it doesn`t help anything, but then neither does over inflated prices and sub-quality games.
Yeah! I do wonder if part of it is just as simple as 'How come we don't sell as much?'. Valve has some amazing people in the game making end of things. Maybe this is why the Valve sales and marketing people don't need to make excuses for poor performance. I know piracy is a problem but it seems that some companies think it's the only reason for poor sales. I also fond of the notion some companies come out with that 'We predicted sales of this much. We sold less. The difference is clearly from piracy'... amazing stuff really.
He said when steam first came out on day one like I said it took 24 hours to download cs 1.6 everytime there was an update it got hammered to death and pretty crappy. Although I could see where they were coming from and where it was going and knew it would get better.
But it was bad when it started.
Possibly but why not? It's not like their making bad games and bragging about the sales.
But on the other hand they could also be bitch slapping all the companies that complain of poor sales and high piracy for poor quality games.
Thanks. That was exactly what I meant. Back when Steam was new I hated it because it replaced a working system (WON) with a halfway-working system that kept crashing during updates and was just so much slower and complicated in comparison.
Today I have to say Steam (or look/feel-alikes) will be the future and given they introduce regional pricing anytime soon they improved on everything. Though I still miss the integrated MP3 player or is one available that I just can't find?
But I like the sun :(
True enough, it is nice (In a way) to hear news not bleating on about piracy. I just hate Gabe Newell something awful, so when his company starts parading stuff that everyone pretty much knew anyway, it annoys me.
* 312,541 sales equates to 3,125,410 USD (assuming everyone paid in USD at $10 each, which doesn't happen now on the Steam store)
* Valve take a 50% cut, leaving 1,562,705 USD
* This gets converted into GBP at whatever exchange rate (let's say averaging 1.8USD per GBP)
* This leaves 868,169 GBP, which would probably be taxed at about 40% as an individual or 20% as a small company (from a quick look on HMRC), leaving 520901.4 GBP or 694,535 GBP respectively.
Admittedly it's still a lot of money to make from something that wasn't a job.