Raj Agrawal

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It’s Not Even Funny How Badly Reported PC Game Sales Are

July 1, 2015 by Raj Agrawal 56 Comments

Lately we are seeing the resurgence of PC gaming. Microsoft has finally admitted that it ignored the PC platform for too long. Every game publisher is pushing out more and more games on the PC. The question is, why? Last month, a gaming website reported that PC games sell more than games on Xbox One. To be honest, it sounds a bit made up. And it sounds made up because we don’t have numbers. For consoles, there are numbers thrown around everywhere. For PC’s, everybody is hush on how much they actually sold.

Gabe Newell
Such sales, much steam. Wow.

Steam is supposed to be the holy grail of PC gaming. These days, the number of active users on Steam peaks at around 9 million. 9 MILLION! And they say Steam makes 1 billion dollars a year. So where are the numbers? Well, they don’t release any. But there are sources. SteamSpy monitors traffic on Steam, to tell us how well a particular game is selling. Their data (while it may be off) is never far from the truth. And just going through their top 100 list of games sold on Steam shows some shocking numbers. I made a list of the top games that sold very well on PC, and whose numbers were never ever reported.

  • Far Cry 3 – 2.6 million copies
  • Tomb Raider (2013) – 3.2 million copies
  • The Witcher 2 : Assassins of kings – 3.4 million copies
  • Dark Souls : Prepare to Die edition – 2 million copies
  • Dishonored : 2.2 million copies
  • GTA 4 – 3.7 million copies
  • GTA 5 – 2.6 million copies (in 2 months. This one will hit 5 million)
  • XCOM : Enemy Unknown – 2.8 million copies
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum (GOTY edition) – 2.2 million copies
  • Batman : Arkham City – 2.6 million copies
  • Bioshock: Infinite – 3.7 million copies
  • Bioshock – 2.9 million copies
  • Mirrors Edge – 2.5 million copies
  • Borderlands 2 : 5.1 million copies
  • Fallout New Vegas : 3.8 million copies
  • The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim – 9.3 million copies (Sold very well on PC)
  • Left for Dead 2 : 13 million copies (Yes, millions of copies just on Steam)

One interesting thing to note is that, Skyrim has sold almost 4 million physical copies in addition to almost 9.5 million copies just on Steam. If you go to VGChartz and see their numbers, you’ll get an impression that PC gaming is dead. It’s like an underworld Mafia -looking poor from the outside, but running a very healthy business without anyone ever knowing. This is one thing gamers and game developers deserve to know.

I can’t imagine what the poor numbers will look like to a startup that is contemplating making a PC game. Having an accurate idea about what’s what is the only thing that can give these ambitious developers the confidence they need.

Filed Under: Gameology Tagged With: steam

Mobile Post Apocalypse – Holy Wars

June 23, 2015 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

I remember holding a Nokia 6600 and being in awe of how revolutionary and cutting edge it looked. It’s a bulky and completely outdated phone by todays standards, but back then it was an absolute beauty. A never before seen form factor, bulky but good-to-hold curves and a brilliant camera for its time really made the phone desirable by many.

I remember the Sony Walkman phone, which was in a league of its own. Sony owned the camera battles back then, but the Walkman phone offered more; unprecedented sound quality, and walkman-like music management. There were other players – you bought a Motorola just for the looks. There was nothing like a Razr back then, and there is nothing that looks like the Razr even now. Every major competitor before Apple brought something new to the table. There were no lists of consumer-friendly phone specs that you could compare. You simply had to choose one which fit your needs the best. DPI, megapixels, cores, rom; none of these things mattered much. And the phones were generally very stable.

There will not be another Nokia 3310, or at least a phone which will be as popular. Why? It’s because back then, spec sheets did not matter much.

Mobile post apocalypse - Analogy (Poussin, Nicolas: The Victory of Joshua over the Amalekites - An excerpt from the The Jewish Bible)
Mobile Post Apocalypse – Pictorial analogy (Poussin, Nicolas: The Victory of Joshua over the Amalekites – An excerpt from the The Jewish Bible)

Apple revolutionised mobiles. It’s true. Whether or not you’re an Android fan, this is something you simply have to accept. Touchscreens were never very popular. Using a stylus to operate smartphones today can get really cumbersome. O2 had a lot of clout among the business elitists, but the world was mainly either Nokia, Sony Erricson, Motorola, or Blackberry. Blackberry owned the majority of the business market, and the other three ruled everything else. All Apple had to do was make a good Touchscreen phone. And it did. And it brought something new to the table; something which was acceptable as the next big thing; something which did not seem ahead of its time. That’s really all you need to do; make something which feels like a logical follow up without really trying to change the world. Apple did just that, and suddenly they were innovators. Every new piece of technology they put into the iPhone became a standard. DPI became the next screen rating. Cameras suddenly felt obsolete in comparison. Music was already their bread and butter and coin. It’s like the world was just waiting for a good ‘smartphone’ – a term that brings about mixed feelings, but that”s for another time.

War is, on many levels, a mind game. Your strength lies not in the strength of your units, but in your ability to use them properly. You cannot always be innovative in a war. You simply have to do what’s necessary; fight fire with lava. And sometimes you just have to do what your opponent does, but for free. And that is what Google did. Android created a mobile ecosystem, which was comparable to iOS, was free, and was open source. Their aim was not to cater to the few elite believing in shelling out a bomb for quality. Their aim was to cater to everybody. They created a model where mobile manufacturers did not have to worry about software. All they had to do was create good hardware which could support Android, much like a PC. Apple was untouchable uptil then, having a daunting monotony on the mobile market. Android is the natural competition the world needed to strive in an Apple dominated world.

The result – Samsung is now one of the top phone manufacturers in the world. HTC have left that O2 image behind and made some excellent phones. This automatically enables a sense of doubt for Apple, which makes it strive to make it products better. And any competition is good competition.

As an end user, I can rest assured that the next phone I buy will be of higher quality than the last, and this trend will only continue. At a certain point, Android left its Apple-copier image, and started taking initiatives of its own. It did what google does best, integrate search into the ecosystem, which is Google’s main source of income. They initiated the Nexus series of phones – the purpose of which was to increase their search base, by selling premium quality phones at mid range prices. And this has worked very well for Google. Nexus 5 is now the standard by which Android phones are measured with. Sure there is the Nexus 6, but it feels like a failed experiment, with its obnoxious pricing. The Nexus 5 is Google at its best in the Android space, and the remastered 2015 edition coming out is a testament to that.

My main gripe with this holy war is this – there used to be a magical (sorta) feeling about holding a mobile phone. When I had held a Nokia Communicator, the sense of awe I got was completely different than holding a 6600. The joy of flapping and unflapping a Moto Razr was unlike anything out there. I could throw around a 3310 and know that it will still ring when I get a call. There was art; art with flaws, but art nonetheless.

Being a software engineer, I now realize that the best way to build a software fast, is to reuse. Almost every phone today is reusing the same curvy edges slim trim design. Almost every Android phone today has a home screen which looks exactly the same.

It still feels great to hold a LG G4, but there’s not much that can surprise me. Sure the phone can look after my every need; way more than any phone back then could possibly do, but it just feels part of my daily life, and not something that I should treasure. And I see this in almost every industry these days. Maybe that is what customers want; a fixed standard set of specs for their daily lives. But when every phones feels the same, you don’t have much of a choice. I used to get butterflies at the thought of buying and exploring a new phone. Now it just feels like i’m buying upgraded software.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: 3310, 6600, apple, google, iOS, LG, nexus, nokia, samsung, sony

We Are Inconsequential In The Cosmos

June 14, 2015 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

We are inconsequential in the cosmos. That’s what I believe when I see stars in the sky. The universe is so big that even if we settle on other planets, it will take us millions of years to even occupy an area of space, no greater than a single drop of water. Even after inhabiting the Earth for so many years, the bigger canvas is still empty. And this is what gives us the rush to venture out into space. One colony on Mars, and you’ll have your next door neighbour’s descendants living in another galaxy someday. But where did this all start? When did someone realise of being so small inspite of being trillions strong?

Messier_78_reflection_nebula_in_Orion
One of the bazillion wonders of our existence – Messier 78 reflection nebula in Orion. Credits to commons.wikimedia.org

The telescope is attributed as an important discovery in human history. Galileo has been more or less credited with its discovery. I’ve always wondered what his muse must have been for coming up with such an idea. The world, with all of its nuances, was still relatively untamed at that period in time. There were a lot many things left to discover on our planet, enough to have still kept us busy after all these centuries. The stars were just mere shining dots back then. It’s easier to admire the beauty of a night sky full of shining stars than to be interrogative about it. It’s difficult to come up with questions about something you can’t even fully understand. So what really piqued our interest?

The Moon is supposed to be the weirdest anomaly known to man. Nobody knows how it came to be, why it exists, why it revolves around the earth, why it has water on its surface. In the many years that we have known of the moon’s existence, we have not been able to make any use of it being there. But, as with all things that seem inconsequential but have a great importance on human history, the moon might be the muse we needed to understand the natural evolution of human kind. Had it not been for the moon, there would be no landing, no proof that we can take ships to other planets. An initial mission to Mars would have been a complete disaster for us, as we would not have had any experience of sustaining ships into outer space for long distances. In any experiment, testing a small sample always proves that the solution works, and had the moon not been there, it would be been a monumental waste of resources trying to land ships on planets months away with conditions much harsher to support a landing.

Even to Galileo, who must have surely slept overlooking the night sky, the moon must have been a wonder to behold. In his intrigued mind, he must have felt a tingling fear, which arises when you see something which drives you crazy because you cannot fathom it, yet is tantalisingly close to understandable. He would have wanted to have a closer look. An “Invention” is a fancy word; it’s merely an alternative for a solution to a problem, and clearly Galileo must have found his problem then and there. The solution naturally followed.

We are inconsequential in the cosmos. But yet we stand for something. We’re a pale blue dot, but one that looks beautiful when viewed from the surface of the Moon. The Moon landing proves one thing above anything else; we have wars to fight, religious beliefs to argue over, governments to revolt against, civil wars to fight, classes to go to on weekdays, churches or temples to go to on weekends, but most of all, accept the fact the all these things are nothing compared to whats out there. That the moon helped make the planet habitable, is just one of the reasons for which it might be more important to us than we care to appreciate.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: moon, nebula, orion, telescope

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