CRPG veteran Brian Fargo, who helped develop the original Fallout games and bring the Wasteland series to life, has reflected on awards for selling "50 or 100,000" units decades ago, commenting how such sales nowadays would spell the "end of your career."
Brian Fargo has a very, very long history of making video games, extending all the way back to when he self-published a text adventure in 1981. Fargo's obviously seen a lot of shifting industry trends come and go over the years, it's fair to say, which is probably what's prompted the reflective tweet below on sales figures for his games.
The images begin with a Gold award for shipping 100,000 copies of 1995's Stonekeeper, while the second is an award for shipping 100,000 copies of Battle Chess, the first title Fargo helped make at Interplay Productions in 1988. There's also an award for the original Baldur's Gate - which Interplay published in 1998 - going Platinum by selling 150,000 copies, and finally an award for first-person shooter Descent selling 100,000 copies.
Back in the day, you'd get an award for selling 50 or 100,000 units, now it's the end of your career. 😆 pic.twitter.com/FfFmxcPT6QJuly 31, 2024
The most interesting part of the tweet, obviously, is Fargo saying how the same number of copies would spell the "end of your career" nowadays for game developers. I'm pretty sure Fargo is speaking from the perspective of a 'AAA' video game developer, and not a solo dev - you can see how something like Assassin's Creed Shadows shipping 100,000 copies would be disastrous for Ubisoft.
But it's all relative. I'm pretty sure the solo developer behind Balatro, for example, who expected to sell "maybe 10 copies" of their smash-hit poker roguelike, would've been over the moon with 100,000 copies sold (as it happens, Balatro ended up selling one million copies). That isn't to say Fargo is wrong, obviously. Just look at the 15 million sales of Baldur's Gate 3 - a figure 100 times larger than the one that netted him that Platinum award.
Take a look at our upcoming indie games guide for an overview of all the smaller games on the horizon.
