The first part of my interview with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell covered his company's upcoming strategy game Elemental, but it wasn't long before the conversation turned toward topics of a more general PC gaming-nature.

What does the Sins of a Solar Empire publisher think about the long-term viability of PC strategy games? Do PC sales charts actually matter? Why isn't Microsoft doing more to help the platform? And who buys PC games these days, anyway? All of these questions--and more!--are answered below.

Shack: It's great that you guys are able to make games like Sins and Elemental on a profitable basis. I think the perception out there is that complex strategy games--even if they're made to be approachable--don't sell. I'm a big fan of Civilization IV--

Brad Wardell: Which sold really well. Civ IV sold extremely well.

Shack: Yeah, right. But I am a little concerned that we won't see as many quality PC strategy games of that scope in the future, at least in the West. That the further we go...

Brad Wardell: ...the more dumbed down the games will get? Yeah. I don't know why that is though, because the sales don't... people said that about Sins of a Solar Empire. When Sins came out, there had been hardly any coverage on it, except Shacknews and a few other places covered it. But outside there, nobody wanted to talk about it, because they were saying, "Look, this is a niche game."

I would even see my own friends in the press--and I don't have much of a social life, so people in the press are my friends--actually refer to Sins of a Solar Empire as a niche game. And I'm like, it's probably one of the best-selling PC games of the last couple years. We're not talking about some game that sold 20,000 copies. We're talking about a game that's approaching a million full-priced units sold. How can you call that niche?

And Sins is about as un-dumbed down as it gets. If you want to play that in multiplayer, that's a two hour game, minimum. And Sins of a Solar Empire actually outsells Demigod pretty well at retail, even though Demigod is selling pretty well. But people that want to play these straight core games tend to play on the console. If I want to play on a PC, I want a mouse.

Shack: Right. And I think you have to take advantage of the PC's strengths. Elemental's extreme zoom is a good example of that. That's instantly attractive to a PC gamer, and it's something native to the platform.

Brad Wardell: Yeah, it facilities something that... Galactic Civilizations II had it in 2006, Supreme Commander had it in 2007, Sins had it in 2008. And it makes a big difference--it's something you can't do on a console yet.

Shack: Do you think that one of the reasons why your friends underestimate a game like Sins is that there's such a vague quality to PC sales charts?

Brad Wardell: That's because everybody lies about their numbers. It's really painful. I mean, on Galactic Civlizations II, we made an OEM deal where ATI or Nivida--I don't remember now--where it was like 10 cents per copy. Well on paper, we sold six billion copies of GalCiv. We don't use that, but you can bet your behind that if you opened up PC Gamer, you'd read "such and such a game sold nine million copies." No. No it didn't. Users want to know how many copies, either digitally or at retail, at full-price, at $40 or $50. You can never get those numbers.

Shack: And how do you solve that problem, especially going into a world where there are competing digital retailers?

Brad Wardell: You can't. There's no easy way to do it. I love Amazon.com, and this is not meant as a criticism, but I've seen places using Amazon.com's numbers. Well, I happen to know those numbers, because we've been number one on there. Number one on Amazon.com means you sold a hundred copies that day. Whereas Walmart or Best Buy might sell 20,000 copies of your game a week. Maybe you should call Walmart on their stats.

That was really painful. In the early days, when Galactic Civilizations II first shipped, it never showed up on the top ten lists. But we were at Walmart. We're number one at Walmart, where you're selling 10,000 copies a week. Whereas at store X, being number one might be selling ten copies.

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