The game industry has its share of myths.
Units sold is usually meaningless. I turned down an offer to sell a million units of Demigod because they would have been sold at less than $1 per unit. So if you see someone talking about units sold, take it for a grain of salt (incidentally, every copy of Sins of a Solar Empire is a full blown copy).
It's just a measurement. Like any statistic it can be taken out of context. Now is that Sins special edition, Sins normal retail, Sins digital, Sins + Entrencment? You can fudge your metrics just the same as any other publisher. Also are you talking about units shipped or units sold at retail as there is a difference between those two metrics?
What gets talked about by the media has little to do with how successful the title is. You’d think the world was dominated by first person shooters. Ask Walmart or Best Buy what they think of first person shooters. Strategy games sell better but tend to be treated as second-class citizens to first person shooters.
Allow me to correct you on this. I will make it easy to read: FPS's dominate the game playing world. To be more specific: FPS's dominate on the three console formats. They are, compared to other genre's, easier and cheaper to make offer a generous ROI and their are plenty of existing IP's out there to exploit (again reducing costs). Considering most retail stores don't carry PC games I will report what I see upon a fleeting visit to Game. Wall, upon wall of console games piled 5 deep. The overwhelming majority of which are First Person Shooters. Hotly followed by some derivative of the platformer, racing games, 'kiddie stuff' and oddly enough an utter shed load of 'brain training' stuff.
Piracy is a joke. Freaking out about piracy is what executives who don’t actually play games do. Piracy is real. Lots of people play pirated games. But the % of them who would have purchased the game is nil. Some genres attract pirates more than others (See first person shooter item above).
You have already appearing in a thread where people stated quite openly a pirated copy of Sins led directly to a sale of that product (and possibly the expansion pack). That then is sufficent to negate your comment of 0%, it is however a metric that would require effort to compute which makes publishers highly adversed to doing it. Again as has been demonstrated, if the majority of releases for sale are First Person Shooters then it logically follows that the most heavily pirated genre would be... Cooking Mama... try again, here's a hint: F.P.S. If the market suddenly started pumping out CRPG's at the same pace they release First Person Shooters then we would see CRPG's leading in terms of shelf space, units sold (and units shipped) and number of pirated copies.
I would also take this opportunity to point out I asked a very simple question in that same thread, which to paraphrase myself is: if piracy is black or white (it exists, it does not exist) would you have wanted the sale if it came via (C) infringment or not?
