Valve releases Half-Life sales figures

There are some people who say that the PC gaming market is in jeopardy, that it can't survive competition with consoles and that it's too hard to publish a game on PC without it being pirated to hell and back. Those people are going to be proved wrong pretty quickly now.

Valve has today issued it's sales figures for it's games catalogue as it sold in stores (I.e. these sales figures don't count Valve's own distribution platform, Steam) and the results are absolutely astounding. Ready?

The original Half-Life, Valve's first game and one of the most critically lauded PC titles ever, has sold an average of one million copies every year ever since it was first released in 1998. That's an average of one million copies per year, for ten years, without counting digital sales. Wowzers.

Half-Life 2 meanwhile, which was the first game to launch predominantly on Valve's Steam service, has sold more than 6.5 million copies in just four years and is still clocking up retail sales. The Orange Box has managed to sell 3 million copies at retail ever since that was released just last year and Left4Dead is currently on track to beat that record by more than 500,000 copies.

A lot of the success of the original games has obviously come from the fact that both Half-Life games got excellent mod support from the start - but that only proves that you don't need to be Valve to make money off the PC. While Counter-Strike began as a free mod for the Half-Life engine and the developers later joined Valve more than 4 million people bought the standalone Counter-Strike package which doesn't come with any other games. Again, without Steam.

Just to prove that you don't need to be all shooter-riffic to make some money from the PC too the sales figures for Garry's Mod were released recently too. The game, which is essentially a Lego-kit for the Half-Life 2 engine, has made the independent team behind the game more than $3 million in sales in just two years, though that figure only counts Steam sales.

PC gaming is dead you say? Pfft. We can't wait to see the sales figures that include digital sales, how about you? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.

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