Purkake

If any of them is going to be remembered it will be GTA IV with all that sweet DLC.

You just said it like it was surprising.

PC version of Red Faction: Guerrilla, sorry for the confusion.

Almost every game mentioned has been a console game or a multiplatform game.

The PC version(of Red Faction: Guerrilla) will come out September 15th. EDIT: Obviously it's too late to delay it now.

The GTA IV DLC is pretty much the best quality DLC out there followed by FO3. Too bad GTA IV still runs like crap on my PC

It's all connected *puts on tinfoil hat*. That may very well be. It would be fun to see how many of the Halo 3 players have actually played Halo 1.

NWN is classic in the PC space, but it is practically unknown in the mainstream console market.(for obvious reasons) Super Mario Galaxy, GTA IV with it's "Hollywood worthy" story, SFIV, Uncharted and some XBLA/PSN games like REZ HD, Geometry Wars 2, Wipeout HD. Maybe Pixeljunk: Eden and Flower for their artsy value.

Your selfishness will be the end of them.

Totally agree. June/July '10 will probably be a bit more crowded than last year, though, with everyone bailing out of the holiday season to avoid MW2 and Halo: ODST.

I'm just trying to show the correlation. Again, I'm not saying that every popular game will be a classic, I'm saying that a popular game has a higher chance of being a classic in the future. The games will be seen as franchises. Gears of War 1 or 2 won't be the classic, just Gears of War the franchise of cover-based third person shooters will be the classic, spawning a mass of other third person cover-based shooters. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise will be seen as another console multiplayer FPS done well in addition to Halo. Super Mario Bros 1 is the most popular NES game with over 40 million units sold, it's also one of the classics.

No not every popular game, but there's a good chance that if a game is popular it will also be considered a classic. There are of course exceptions, which is why I said that it's not a hard and fast rule. Let's look at the best selling 360 games from wikipedia: # Halo 3 (8.1 million) # Gears of War (5 million, may include PC version) # Gears of War 2 (5 million) # Grand Theft Auto IV (4.324 million approximately: 3.29 million in US, at least 1 million in UK, 34,000 in Japan) # Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (4.172 million approximately: 3.04 million in US, 78,000 in Canada, 54,742 in Japan, at least 1 million in UK) # Call of Duty: World at War (3.35 million approximately: 2.75 million in US, 600,000 in UK) Are you telling me that Halo 3, Gears of War, GTA IV and CoD4 won't be seen as classics in however many years?

In the hearts and minds of the current mainstream, yes. It is pretty much the only reason Fallout 3 sold ~9 million+ copies. There's still a bunch of people who play Oblivion and probably enjoy it a lot. no way! seriously you're not thinking that logic through! in ten years will the gaming community be praising nintendogs as a true classic worthy of being put alongside metroid zelda system shock or baldurs gate? what about wii play? its not even really a game, but its popular as all hell. or even better madden 2008 - millions of copies sold, yet Im pretty sure in ten years you wont see this bad boy in any top 100 games of all time lists... popular DOES NOT EQUAL FUTURE CLASSIC. though to be a future classic it REALLY helps to have been popular on release. but slowtrains example of system shock 1 shows that its not required. Sorry, let's make an exception for all things Nintendo(damn casuals messing up my formula). A popular game on the PS360 -> classic in the future. It's just a general guideline, not a hard and fast rule. Games like Shadow of the Colossus will also be considered classics because of their artsy-ness and doing different things, even if they're not popular.

It's sold over a million units, pleasing THQ, the publisher and beating (at least some) analysts' expectations of ~500k-650k. Even if that wasn't the case, RF:G had pretty much the best possible conditions to sell as much as it was going to. If it hadn't sold, you'd have to look at faults with the game itself or the marketing.

Basically the formula is: popular game today -> classic in the future. It's as simple as that.

There's plenty of ME love in the mainstream. This is not really the place to make such a list, with all the crotchety old-skool people. As long as you can see the impact of a game like WoW, it's ok. You don't have to like it, but to deny it's impact is stupid. @Boo: Halo is not going anywhere hype or no. It's pretty much THE console FPS and it's not some horrible abomination. It's a fun game with high production values and a good multplayer(minus the screechy kids on Live). It's just not a PC game.

A linear game being linear is not a weak point. If the game was meant to be that way, it's neither a plus or a minus. Is Super Mario Bros bad because you only go from left to right? I think it was perfect in size, it changed things up and didn't make you do the same thing for too long. Non-linear games are not inherently superior. The nice thing is that every game's hype machine (or lack thereof) runs out after a few years. Once nobody cares any more, once there's no more money to be made, no more axes to grind, no more mags to sell, games can be seen more clearly for what they really brought to the table ( or didn't bring). If you have only played ME and no earlier Bioware or BIS games, you won't have any other points of reference and ME will remain the awesomest WRPG ever in your mind.

Looks like SEGA releases the sales numbers, but not the expected sales.

The gist of the problem. I see it as a victory of the hype machine and advertising over any sort of general consensus of what makes a game great today. Also the broadening spectrum of gamers has set mediocrity and susceptability to style over substance as a desirable trait in a gamer. While this may sound like elitist wankery I think there is plenty of truth in it. Even if you pointed out the lameness and unoriginality of most of those titles, it would serve no purpose as their status is already set. Whether it's true or not that's (apparently) the point of this thread. Also WoW is more than a classic, it pretty much single-handedly defined the MMO as it stands and achieved both critical and popular acclaim. Newer MMOs are called post-WoW for a reason.

Is SEGA publicly traded? If so they should have quarterly reports where they have the profits and also the expectations for future sales. That's how Bionic Commando's expected sales of 1.5 million came out. The game sold like 50k copies

Everything would have been awesome, but I felt that the developer really needed to one-up me in the end and pull a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan himself. It was totally unnecessary, but apparently the game wasn't artsy enough. Having the story be as the ending suggested, would have been perfect, but Mr. Blow just had to mess it all up. That won't stop them from being seen as classics by the mainstream. It's the most played game on Live, to this day.

I was not actually nominating anything, it was more of a pessimistic prediction based on where the mainstream is going. Halo as in the series. or Halo 3 if you want to be nitpicky.

What will be looked at as classics in 5-10 years by the mainstream gaming community? Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Mass Effect(with sequels), Bioshock and a bunch of weird Japanese games that only the Sony fanboys care about(MGS4, FFXIII+). Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian for the artsy crowd. World of Goo is an awesome indie game, but no one is going to remember it as a classic.

I try to keep up with the software sales numbers and it's usually pretty depressing. I'm not saying that AP will bomb, it's just the worst time to be an unknown game in a down economy(clich

By that time the Bioshock franchise will be run so deep into the ground that even Bioshock 5: The re-return of the Big Half-Cousin won't save it.