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Holiday's over, PC sales charts. You had a grand couple weeks off, now get back to work. We need to be shown how Blizzard are able to afford to sprinkle gold dust on the canteen doughnuts.
The NPD sales charts are traditionally a little...sketchy when it comes to PC sales. But for the week ending November 1, they look right on the money, with Fallout 3 taking not just the top spot, but 3rd and 9th spot as well with the two collectors editions. With the game still charting well on both Steam and Direct2Drive, you can easily see where a lot of those 4.7 million shifted copies went.
The tinkering continues! The official NPD charts were interesting, but fundamentally flawed. So we added Steam's charts as well. Steam painted a much clearer picture of the actual purchasing habits of PC users, but was still incomplete, because we'd left off the other major purveyor of digital distribution, Direct2Drive. So this week, they're included as well, giving us not one, not two, but three PC sales charts. If you can't get a clear idea of what's been selling on the PC after that, well, you're probably asking too much of your sales charts.
Posted by Logan Booker at 6:00 PM on July 18, 2008
Imagine you're a publisher, and there's a problem with the copy protection on the Direct2Drive version of your game. You don't have time to/can't be bothered chasing up the unprotected executable for the title (which you should have in easy reach), so you just browse to your favourite crack search engine, whack in the game's title, and download the appropriate hack.
According to a thread over at Ubisoft's forums, this is exactly what the publisher did with Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. A savvy user opened the latest game executable (v1.03) in a hex editor, and found the tag for a crack group known as "Reloaded". The patch responsible was once available from Ubisoft's support site, but has since been removed... which doesn't look good for the company.
The only official comment so far has come from a community manager:
The arrival of Ubisoft's catalog on Steam continues to clunk along, as gamers hoping to be "one of the first to play the PC adaptation of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed" find themselves without a playable version. The PC port is currently on sale at traditional retail locations but the digital unlocking won't happen until 5 PM PDT, it seems. It's an unusual exception in the Steam world, where those awake at 12:01 PDT the day off can burn the midnight oil with their pre-loaded purchases.
