Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

[Oli]

The company behind popular PC titles such as Counter Strike and Half-Life have released their sales figures for the most popular games:

Beloved developer Valve has released lifetime retail sales figures for some of its more popular games, including the Half-Life and Counter-Strike series, revealing that the studio has sold over 32.8 million games since the 1998 release of the first Half-Life.

Sales from Valve's digital distribution client are not factored in, with the figures only accounting for worldwide retail sales. With Half-Life 2, Valve began simultaneously releasing all of its PC games at retail and via Steam. The numbers were originally printed in the November issue of Game Informer, then republished by Gamasutra.

Furthermore, it was not specified if the figures of multiplatform games--Half-Life, Half-Life 2, The Orange Box--included both PC and console sales, or just PC.

• Half-Life (Valve) / 1998 - 9.3 Million
• Half-Life: Opposing Force (PC, Gearbox) / 1999 - 1.1 Million
• Half-Life: Blue Shift (PC, Gearbox) / 2001 - 800,000

• Counter-Strike (PC, Valve) / 2000 - 4.2 Million
• Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (PC, Valve) / 2004 - 2.9 Million
• Counter Strike: Source (PC, Valve) / 2006 - 2.1 Million
• Counter-Strike (Xbox, Valve) / 2003 - 1.5 Million

• Half-Life 2 (Valve) / 2004 - 6.5 Million
• Half-Life 2: Episode One (PC, Valve) / 2006 - 1.4 Million

• The Orange Box (Valve) / 2007 - 3 Million
(Half-Life 2 HL2: Episode One, HL2: Episode Two, Portal, Team Fortress 2)

You can read the full story here.

[jake_]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

Half-Life sure has sales way up there compared to everything else...

[MrKLM]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

so in other words these figures are totally useless since it leaves out so many important factors?

[Namakan]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

That is a TON of sales with out the "digital distribution" coughcough Steam coughcough

[Shawn Zipay]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

so in other words these figures are totally useless since it leaves out so many important factors?

Not really considering these are some of the first hard facts we have with regards to sales figures on these titles.

As noted, it's estimated that for HL2 alone, Steam sales were roughly 25% of the total sales made from retail stores.

This number has gone up with subsequent releases and Gabe Newell said at the start of this year that they expect sales on Steam to nearly match those of retail stores by the end of this year.

[MrKLM]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

but these figures also from what i read only include the pc version? and not the console versions? half life 1 was even released on dreamcast.

[Shawn Zipay]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

As you can also tell, they didn't release figures for Day of Defeat, DoD: Source. Also, the only console figures they released were for CS on the Xbox.

[Oli]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

For our purpose, since we're not all economists the figures they gave us are suitable.

The number one point from the release is that: The Half Life series is most successful in terms of sales.

[Lord_Mordja]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

In a way. It's racked up that impressive number after ten years, while The Orange Box only came out a year ago and already has nearly one third of Half Life's sales. And that's not even counting STEAM sales.

[FPS[SONIC]]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

Interesting stuff. Steam is a great system now that the kinks have been worked out and broadband Internet is so common. Make my games Steam games and I'm a happy gamer. =)

VALVe, make check payable to "Sonic Pixel" please. Don't forget the space. :laugh2:

[Kylee!]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

Um, wut? Condition Zero sold more copies than source? Thats broken... and the Orange Box has definitely sold more.

[RocketChild]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

Yeah, I kinda like the idea of buying on steam now. I was not too hip on the idea when EA was trying to push sales of its booster packs for BF2, but it is nice the way Value supports Steam in a way that makes it worth it. Never loosing a game media, no punkbuster issues, and the integration of the community makes it great. I'm happy to see more software houses move to it. And on top of all that, the icing on the cake...Value accomplished all that Steam has given everyone on their own...when everyone from Microsoft to Electronic Artist said it was impossible or not worth their time.

[Eagle101]

Re: Valve Reveals Lifetime Sales

You go Valve!!!