Last month’s surprise drop of a bunch of EA classics on Steam was—for those of us who still live in 2005—the hottest release of the year. I don’t know about you, but I picked up The Saboteur, Populous, and all the old Command & Conquer games immediately. Having them in my main Steam library, shorn of the EA App, was too tempting a prospect to turn down.
Apparently, a lot of you shared that feeling. GI.biz reports that the European game charts for March were absolutely dominated by a bunch of RTSes from over 20 years ago: 11 of the 20 top-selling games in Europe were good old Command & Conquers, and that’s across digital and physical sales, too.
In fact, five of March’s top 10 were Command & Conquer games. C&C: Generals was the most popular, occupying position #4 behind EA Sports FC 24, Helldivers 2, and Dragon’s Dogma 2. Meanwhile, Red Alert 2, Tiberian Sun, Renegade, and Red Alert 1 took up positions #7 through #10. For perspective: The most recent game on that list—Renegade—came out 22 years ago.
One thing that confuses me is that neither Steam nor the EA App will let you purchase the games in the C&C Ultimate bundle individually. It’s all or nothing. Given that, I’m not entirely sure how Generals is several spaces ahead of its partners, but I put it down to a quirk of record-keeping. These stats, after all, come from GSD, which gets its numbers directly from publishers like EA.
Regardless, it’s bad luck for games like WWE 2K24 and Princess Peach Showtime, which got punted out of the top 10 and 20 respectively last month because EA went and put a bunch of two-decade old RTSes on Steam. Obviously, 2K should retaliate by putting out The Darkness 1 on PC. Let’s try and parlay this into a releasing-old-games arms race between the megacorps. One of you guys has to put out Mercenaries eventually.
So what can we attribute C&C’s meteoric return to? Well, they’re all absolute classics, for one thing, so that has something to do with it, but the Ultimate Collection has been on Origin/the EA App for a while.
Sure, it’s mostly down to the fact that Steam is the de facto PC storefront and we’d all rather have our games there than spread across a bunch of different platforms, but I think the sheer terribleness of the EA App has something to do with it, too. The Steam release of the C&C Ultimate Collection doesn’t require you to go through EA’s daft launcher. I don’t know about you, but that made it a must-buy for me.
