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Minecraft, you may have heard, is pretty popular. In January 2011, while the game was still in beta, it passed 1 million sales. Two and a bit years later, the PC edition has now hit the 10 million sales mark. Gosh, that's a big round number. The Xbox 360 edition recently passed 6 million too, while the mobile version has sold at least 7 million.
Developer and publisher Square Enix has changed its positive predictions for the financial year from a healthy profit to a crippling loss, and announced plans to bring in reforms and restructuring. Sleeping Dogs, Hitman Absolution, Tomb Raider all failed to meet high sales expectations. The company had forecast a net profit of around $37 million for the fiscal year, which ends March 31, but has now revised that to be a whopping $138 million loss. Ouch.
Now, really, the correct way to look at the latest annual Call of Duty setting record sales every year is that video games are becoming a greater part of mainstream culture, making them more acceptable. So, really, you should be glad that Activision today announced that, on top of setting new day-one sales records, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 has beaten last year's installment to the $1 billion mark. You are, aren't you?
A few years ago, the idea that the sandbox-y first-person stealth-ish shooter could ever find a second wind would be met with sorry sighs. Delightfully, after Deus Ex: Human Revolution last year and now Dishonored, the future's looking grand for the genre time almost forgot. Dishonored publisher Bethesda Softworks has said that sales of Arkane's sneak 'em up are "far exceeding" expectations, and dubbed it "a new franchise."
Activision has gone over the launch-day figures for the latest Call of Duty game and once again declared the latest instalment the biggest-selling yet. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 sold-through an estimated $500 million, according to data from market research firm Chart-Track and its own internal sources. You may personally be growing tired of annualised Call of Duty sequels, but the world certainly isn't.
Though the days of plain old WoW-alike subscription MMORPGs seem numbered, Guild Wars 2 is proving you don't need to go fully free-to-play to find an audience. The subscription-free MMORPG has sold over two million physical and digital copies, publisher NCsoft announced today, and hit over 400,000 concurrent players.
The games market went to Hell in May. Diablo III topping software sales for the month, according to the latest sales figures from NPD, and helped fuel a resurgence in the PC games space.
Blizzard has declared Diablo III the fastest-selling PC game of all time, selling 3.5 million copies within the first 24 hours, and boasting over 6.3 million players within the week.
Gentle reader, be warmed by the happy ending to the oft-sad story of Alan Wake's PC edition. Within only 48 hours of launching, Developer Remedy has more than earned back the money it spent making the jazzed-up port.
Indie superstar funding group the Indie Fund has scored a resounding hit after Q.U.B.E., the first Fund-backed release, earned enough on Steam in its first four days to recoup the investment.
