Unreal Tournament 3 on the rise!?
January 30, 2008 12:13 am Rants, MediaAs you may know, Unreal Tournament 3 received a fair bit of negative publicity for it’s supposed poor sales and low activity during the month of December. Interestingly the activity of the UT3 community, particularly in the UT3 CTF Hosted Cup, seems to dispute this. The cup admins have received well over a dozen emails from teams who were too late to sign up and quite a few matches have already been played. Meanwhile a second coverage team has joined up and started covering division 1 matches with both shoutcasting and videostreams. They even made an awesome intro for their services!
While the cup has been progressing steadily, with an interesting upset when TRS beat fan favorite Sanctuary by 2-1 (1-0 Coret, 1-1 Reflection), modders have released the UT3 version of TAM, which has swiftly become popular in pickups. Subsequently Epic announced plans for a new beta patch to be released pretty much any day now, with a lengthy list of fixes. Hopefully they’ll also manage to squeeze in that all-important “console copy/paste” fix that everyone has been asking for before the final release is done. Now of course that’s all fine and dandy, but what about it’s poor sales and activity? Isn’t Unreal Tournament 3 doing extremely poorly?
Well… looking at todays overview of NPD sales statistics for the month of December: that does not appear to be the case. In November both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 struggled to make the top 20, now Crysis is firmly in 7th place and UT3 ranks in at a decent 15th. Both seem to indicate much better sales in December than the month before and in light of Mark Rein’s recent comment that UT3 is selling quite decently for an Unreal Tournament game - seems to indicate that my initial assumption was correct: the press made a big deal out of something quite ordinary. Hopefully Unreal Tournament 3 will continue to pick up higher sale figures, because while it may not be the most well-polished game, it’s definitely the best multiplayer shooter right now and the polish will come eventually!
Now then, it’s time to get back to playing. We have a cup match tomorrow!
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January 31st, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Your only seeing part of the story.
The sales numbers are not showing the true number of players actually playing the game. Visit any of the more popular UT forums and you will see dozens of players who have purchased the game, but no longer play it. There have been many MANY admins who simply gave up running a UT3 server due to either the poor player turnout or the even worse poor implimantation of the server itself. The game admins on unrealadmin.org where even cracking joke about getting thier money back for the “beta” version of the game Epic released.
The most common comment that I have seen in the true dedicated community has been “Epic Failure”.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:58 am
Yes, sales figures do not show directly how many people are playing, but they’re generally a decent enough indication (alongside rising ClanBase and IRC-praccy activity). But using forums as indication of a game’s popularity and playercount is quite ridiculous. Forums always show the negative, and only the negative, picture - if you went by forums as an indication for game sales and popularity then World of Warcraft would certainly be one of the least popular games in the world… not the MMO with the highest active subscriber count.
As for ‘many’ admins giving up on hosting UT3 servers… as if that matters when there’s still roughly 1000 servers, plenty to host the current UT3 community fourfold. Furthermore, Epics forthcoming patch should fix a fair few things in the server hosting respect - and I know many an admin/clan who’s actually going to launch a server come beta patch 2 with webadmin support.
As for what your ‘true dedicated community’ is - I don’t know. I have to admit that I don’t know too many server admins, if that’s what you were referring to. I would consider the players since day 1 - those who’ve been at UT since the original game - to be the true dedicated community. And in that regard, the vast majority I’ve spoken does regard UT3 as the best game since UT99. The interface might suck and it still has it’s share of bugs (albeit less than most new games nowadays), but in terms of pure gameplay it’s awesome - which is what the players seem to be recognizing now that UT2004 is essentially dead aside from TAM (and even that’s dieing very quickly now) where UT3 is rapidly growing in (competitive) activity.