I am arguing with some EA people, trying to prove them their old games are still worth fixing... but so far low-level EA people, so they can't access their own financial info.

Can I get a list of GOG.com most sold games in the last 2 months or something like that? The usual "popular" list in the front-page has the issue that it follows the promos, thus it tends to show whoever is in promotion now.

Unless GoG can pull it out (and not break NDA, or some privacy law) i am not sure how else you'd be able to get the statistics you need, as it's probably fair to say a very small percentage of us frequent the forums.

You can get the all-time most sold games in order by going to the games tab and sorting by bestselling.
While the front page seems to be by daily popularity, the games "bestselling" is all time.

Just make up numbers and if they ask for additional information or a source, tell them that you'll need them to buy the "Works Cited" DLC.

But they'll need to install your personal software management client first, which they can do once they agree to your EULA. I hear corporate types love that sort of thing.

[url= Right. No smileys. Let's see if that was ridiculous enough that nobody freaks out. ][/url]

Defender's Quest lifetime sales stat in 2013 is 40,451 copies, or $286,646 in gross revenue. In the bestselling page, Defender's Quest rests in the eighth page of total 28 pages. So any game above it probably sold better than 40,451 copies.

I guess that's the closest we can get to raw number of sales.

I think 200k+ would be enough motivation enough to fix up an old game. Usually it can be done in a couple of days anyway.

This kind of information is not public, and, most companies won't release them. They would actually end up hurting the company, because of "medieval" way of thinking for many uninformed people, when they see all income as profit.

Now, regarding your game tester friends, trying to get EA financial figures and give them too you, that seems like a nice way of sending your friends to jail. Hope you'll succeed in your crusade, great knight.

I doubt that GOG would give you the kind of data you're asking for.

You could always look into the Bestsellers List.

You know, the question is what you're talking about when you say "fixing". I don't know if you're referring to the kind of work GOG does or actual patches for ancient games. Just doing some external stuff, packaging games with wrappers etc. and doing some QA obviously is worth the effort since that's how GOG started and what GOG continues to do. Digging up source codes of old games and have fresh programmers familiarize themselves with the code and figuring out how to improve it is a different matter altogether. It may be worth it for ports of games like Strife or Aliens Versus Predator 2000 but not necessarily more obscure titles that never became big successes to begin with.

If they're too low down in the company to have financial info... why the hell do you think they will be able to decide whether a game gets released here?

Well, no, that was for sales of the game across all platforms -

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/186940/defenders_quest_by_the_numbers_.php.

Defenders Quest only sold ~3,200 copies initially.

We do know, however, that Psychonauts has sold on GOG about 32,000 copies, so anything higher up has sold more. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the EA games here have sold 50,000-100,000 copies.

Oooops, people misunderstood me.

I don't want numbers ^.^

I don't even considered that!

I just wanted a list of top20 games or something, paste it to the EA employee, and tell him: "Hey look, EA games at x, y and z spot!"

As for what I mean by "fixing"

I am trying to convince EA to let people (maybe a professional, maybe modders, maybe themselves... it depends on how things go) patch their games in some way (using the sources, reverse engineering, whatever).

For example their games from the Windows XP era are in serious trouble: they can't be emulated with DosBox, are too heavy to be emulated with a virtual machine (many used Pentium 4, that if you look is not much slower than a today CPU, also many used GPU too, that only special computers can use "GPU passtrhough" with virtual machines), and don't run anymore properly on newest OSes because of both Microsoft ditching support for DirectX before 9, and nVidia (and maybe AMD) also ditching support for DirectX before 9.

In fact I've found out that nVidia stopped supporting Direct 1-8 in 2008, the fact that games kept running so far was due to Microsoft making workarounds, the nVidia drivers don't even try to respond to DX 1-8 requests correctly.

So their games need to be actually patched, wrappers aren't enough (unless you make some really invasive ones, since there is also RDTSC issue, and some other problems), if this issue is delayed too much, soon will be unfixable, specially as companies die, fire their devs, and so on (Example: EA closed Maxis Emeryville, there is no way to know now if they stored the sources for Maxis games or not).

Of course, this also applies to other companies that made games in the same era, I am talking about EA because I am fully willing to fix SimCity 4 (that is a game I am particularly fond of) by myself.


EDIT: for the technically curious if you want I can post here my findings about why games from that era are having trouble working on current machines and OSes.

You want to fix SimCopter and Streets of SimCity!

OMG!