Earlier today, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell spoke at the Games for Change conference. There, he announced that since its launch in April Portal 2 has managed to sell a paltry 3 million copies worldwide. He used the number as “evidence” that games can be both educational and commercially successful. Apparently, educators have used the game to explain incredibly difficult physics concepts such as “speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.”
Anyway, who care’s about that education stuff? That’s only there to distract us from the pitiful fact that Portal 2 only managed to sell 3 million copies. That’s barely a million per month. Utterly pathetic. No wonder why we here at Gamer Limit gave Portal 2 the lowest score possible: 8 out of 10. What an utterly crap game. DJ Hero is a way better educational game because it’s about music, which is way more fun than smelly physics, which I somehow know even though I haven’t played it. Also, it has sold more copies, sort of. Take that Valve, Activision is still #1 — with a bullet — something portal guns can’t even shoot.
Source: Gamasutra
Coincidentally, 1 million murders a month would be considered genocide. I digress.
Why is 1M a month bad? Sounds good to me. How much was it priced retail? Times 3M+, I’m sure they recouped and then some, and in only a few months. There’s also the quantity v quality argument. Chrono Trigger didn’t sell as much as Square wanted and it’s one of the best games ever made. Call the bias troll.
Are you slow ?
There you are bias troll.
@Killroy you’re mad slow. Like an elephant came and stepped on your foot.
Well Kyle, how many copies of your game have you-oh that’s right, you don’t make games. Way to be the failed athlete that yells at the sports on TV.
Dick move on this article Kyle, I’m pretty sure no one got what you were “really” trying to say. Pro tip, text can’t really convey inflection very well. This sounds like a forum post written by some anti valve troll, not an article by GL. Stop alienating your reader base, they can’t tell that you are just pissed about the sale numbers. Instead they assume you’re just a moron and hated P2. Maybe re-write time?
Ah – I for one certainly don’t hate Valve. Sorry you were offended! I’m sure that wasn’t Kyle’s intention.
Either way, how’s your WoW career going? Still playing through Cataclysm?
Nah I wasn’t offended. I just had to re-read his article a few times before I was sure it wasn’t a slight against valve. So I thought I would post and let other people know that he just failed hard at his sarcasm and doesn’t really hate P2.
As for Wow, I gave up on it and quit a few months ago. Blizz always waits way to long in releasing new content. It kills the game for a ton of people. My whole crew has moved on to other games. League of Legends, Shogun Totalwar, and Minecraft. I actually run my own Minecraft server now, and was pleasantly surprised on how amazing that game is.
Kyle,
Your humor didn’t work. This is a news story. It isn’t your place to say whether sales were good or bad. People that may not get your humor will be confused when they come to Gamer Limit for the news.
Tell the news and let your humor “shine” in columns and features.
I for one appreciated the humor. 3M copies… pfff.
@Chase
This could be a four hour long podcast debate, but I’ll keep it short.
In Entertainment Media, in my opinion, there are two types of styles:
*Standard journalism
*Entertainment based opinion injection
In my opinion, entertainment writing (especially blogging) is a very different beast – and gaming is an even wilder beast than any other entertainment medium. We aren’t writing about political figures, or important people – we’re writing about guns, blood, and robots. Is that excuse partially a reason why gaming, as a medium, is infantile in our current age? Sure – I’d agree with that statement.
However, I think once we lose our ability to joke around in this medium, which we are extremely passionate about, we’ll lose something special about gaming. There are many people out there who view gaming strictly as an artistic medium, and want it to be taken seriously. Others just want to have fun and knock around a few demons at the end of the work day. Personally, I fall somewhere in-between, albeit slightly more on the demonic side.
If you want facts, there are plenty of vanilla gaming blogs out there for that. However, to use Destructoid as an example, there are not that many blogs out there who are willing to have an honest stance on news (accompanied by sometimes scathing honest opinions) – and that’s not necessarily a good thing, because I like choice. In my opinion, given my justification for entertainment media following a different set of rules, I believe that is acceptable, and I think it offers a fresh, different perspective.
I think you should give this a read, and see how focusing too much on facts in an entertainment realm can negatively affect your integrity:
http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-content-slave-speaks-out/
Is the case of a shadowy corporate figure, looming over lowly bloggers on AOL’s multi-million dollar network a stark contrast to an independent gaming blog, who operates on unpaid writers? Sure.
However, I think giving bloggers more freedoms easily outweighs constricting them. It’s an interesting thought, and definitely something that won’t get settled anytime soon in the gaming blogisphere.
Chase is too cool for the blog life now. He’s all on his high horse doing the college writing thing. Right Chase?
I will read the article later and comment on it.
I think giving bloggers freedom is perfectly fine, when they aren’t putting their opinion into news.
It has absolutely NO place in news. I don’t care what type of news it is. Entertainment, food, politics…it doesn’t matter. Putting one’s opinion in the news section of any website undermines your ability get the unbiased message out.
There is plenty of time to be cheeky and fun in other areas! Let the freedom ring there! The enthusiast press should be fun and entertaining to read, but not when you are giving out the news. That should be straight and to the point. Get the message across, and let the readers hash it out.
Even if entertainment writing is trying to be fun, it needs to establish some guidelines and principles of ethics so readers will know when to take it seriously, or when it is goofing off.
Kyle’s article literally lambasted Valve for not selling enough copies. Even if it was satire, it didn’t do anything for the article. It added nothing to it but confusion. The article is a bit better now, I guess. Now it just needs to be reorganized, but that’s just my college high-horse.
Well, if people can’t tell that you’re trying to be funny then you’ve failed horribly. Also let’s look at the title of this train wreck. When this article gets picked up by the search bots or any other gaming sites it’ll look like GL is bashing Valve. Sarcasm in text form has to be obvious or most idiots will just assume you’re serious (meaning most of the interwebz will think your serious).
So, this one time I heard that videogames were games and that games were these things about having fun and not being so serious all the time.
The minute gaming journalism loses its bias and sarcasm, games will have lost their soul.
Bottom line: The humor failed.
The humour could only fail if you a) had never played Portal in your life; or b) had the same mental integrity as a cabbage!
the fun and excitement that sdrrounued this very special day. To view the clip on their website, click here. This video is just a sneak peak so watch this space for