Sins of a Solar Empire Sells 100,000 in Three Weeks

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Fans of Ironclad and Stardock's innovative PC strategy title Sins of a Solar Empire will be pleased to know that the game is selling strong, with 100,000 copies unloaded after 23 days at retail.

Sins also beat out Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade to take the top spot in North American PC game sales last week, according to Gamasutra. The title is sold in stores and through Stardock's online distribution platform Stardock Central.

Stardock reports that a demo for the game will be coming soon. For more information on Sins, check out our review.

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    February 28, 2008 11:56 AM

    Fuck....me. No copy protection and it beats out COD4 and WoW's expansion. If that isn't something to support I don't know what is. I really wish I could get into strategy games more, because these guys are definately worth supporting and I hear this one is pretty much Strategy's GOTY 2008.

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      February 28, 2008 12:08 PM

      It beat out Burning Crusade and CoD4 last week. Burning Crusade has been out for over a year now. CoD4 has also been out for a few months as well.

      I'd somewhat expect new games to beat out ones that have been out for a while, especially those out for over a year.

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        February 28, 2008 12:10 PM

        And you're looking at it selling ~33,000 units in that week.

        If that's the number one game, that's a very depressing week.

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      February 28, 2008 12:13 PM

      These are great sales for an independent title and it's exciting to see a smaller independent title from a smaller publisher succeeding, but don't read too much into that... I love what they're doing at Stardock but beating a months-old title whose lowest sales # is on the PC and a year+ old WoW expansion in sales for only one week isn't that a dramatic broad statement :)

      I need to get this thing installed and play it... I ended up buying it right before I built my new system and haven't had any time to get my games up and running on it yet :(

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        February 28, 2008 12:26 PM

        Still, the overall fact that they sold six figures of a niche title despite being criminally easy to pirate is impressive. Especially for an unproven IP with no demo. Outside of the mainstream you're doing good to sell 200,000 copies, ever.

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          February 28, 2008 12:46 PM

          maybe this is nuke worthy but:

          the fact that its criminally easy to "steal" is actually a reason a buddy and i threw in together to buy it. He insisted on buying the collectors edition/boxed version since he had major trust into the stardock guys after galciv2 (he shilled me into playing his copy but its not really my game even though i can see why people are raving about it). And since i'm cheap i didn't want to pay full price without a demo.

          We can play it over hamachi together without hassle or protection and they got money from us for a great product that truth to be told i would not have bought or played otherwise.

          i've played int only 5/6 times with him against the computer and we are not going to play it that much because even with time acceleration a game takes a while but i think once/if i get the hang of the game i will buy my own copy to play. I'm glad that the game is doing well enough though.

          btw another plus, the game is not available in europe since it has no publisher BUT you can buy it per paypal and if you want a retail box i can tell you trough experience that it will be sent quite fast (you can play until then per digital download).

          lets hope mittense doesn't kill me in my sleep.

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            February 28, 2008 12:53 PM

            Well, although I'm sure you will be nuked, I've been tempted to "try" it in a similar fashion. However, I like to send a signal to developers that if they want me to buy their game, they need to release a demo first. There are games I will buy without a demo, but few and far between.

            And since a demo is forthcoming anyway, I'll just hold off for that.

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              February 28, 2008 1:03 PM

              Normally i'd agree but given that they are not EA/Activision/Eidos i can understand that a demo would take time and money they do not have as an independent developer. at least it doesn't have priority and they already have released a patch etc and the demo is promised to come.

              for example, i bought the witcher also without a demo, something i would not do with any big studio game.

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                February 28, 2008 1:05 PM

                I buy games based on studio type all the time. I know I bought Depths of Peril and Armageddon Empires recently without having any idea what kind of games they were. I just buy them because I've heard they're good and I know the developers aren't big-name studios whatsoever.

                This also ends up with me broke most weeks, but at least it's a good broke. It helps that both of these games were also fantastic.

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                  February 28, 2008 1:14 PM

                  hmn yeah, unfortunately this leads to me buying many games that i never actually play :)
                  see defcon/uplink

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                February 28, 2008 2:09 PM

                Oh, I get that the smaller devs can't put out a pre-release demo every time. But what I'm saying is that if you want me to buy your game I need to try it first (unless you're Valve). I'm assuming you don't want me to pirate it so the only other option is a demo. Whenever you can get to it.

                A neat compromise might be the Savage 2 approach - release the full game as a demo, just timed. Yes, someone will crack the timeout but it achieves both the "need to release a demo" and "need to release the full game" in one fell swoop.

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            February 28, 2008 12:55 PM

            It's actually completely legal for two people to play each other in a LAN game.

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              February 28, 2008 12:55 PM

              With one copy, that is.

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                February 28, 2008 12:57 PM

                i take that as "i wont kill you in your sleep".

    • reply
      February 28, 2008 1:17 PM

      I think I'm going to need to pick up SoSE now. Stardock deserves it.

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        February 28, 2008 10:17 PM

        Don't buy it because they "deserve it." Buy it because it's a fun game that you plan to enjoy. I bought it for multiple reasons, one being in hopes of enjoying it, and damn it's fun, coming from a longtime fan of 4x games like Master of Orion 2, etc. Can't say that I've played a long list of 4x games, but that doesn't mean that I'm lying when I say I enjoy 4x games, and since RTS games > FPS games for me, well, merging 4x with an RTS makes this game all the more glorious, along with the "pew pew lasers" that the shack review brings up as well.

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