But now we have some sales figures! Good Old Games’ Guillaume Rambourg has been talking to Gamesindustry.biz about The Witcher 2′s sales on GOG.com, Direct2Drive, Impulse, Gamersgate, and Steam.

Click through for the stats.

Direct2Drive, Impulse and Gamersgate’s combined sales combined hit only 10,000 sales of CD Projekt’s RPG, whereas GOG managed to shift a cool 40,000 copies.

Then there’s Steam. Valve’s digital distribution service managed to shift 200,000 copies in the same time period. That’s 4x it’s competitor’s sales figures combined. Impressive stats, but Steam’s dominance over the digital distribution market isn’t that surprising, Tom discussed the very subject with GPG’s Chris Taylor earlier this year. The Supreme Commander dev thinks the “playing field’s gonna level out” over the next five years. His seminal RTS was released on Steam in October this year.

Last night we heard the sad news that Steam’s database has been hacked. You might want to change your password if you haven’t already.

Supreme Commander 2 has been available on Steam since it launched, but the original has only been available online via other digital distribution services.

Pricing details are coming soon.

Update: And they’re up! $15 a piece, or $20 for both.

On Thursday we mentioned a massive game of Supreme Commander between six PC Gamer writers and two overpowered AIs. There’s a write up of it in the new issue of PC Gamer UK, and we finally found time to record it as a video for anyone who wants to see it for themselves.

Graham and I do our best to commentate what’s going on – please forgive my erratic observing, our patchy memories, and the bits where our voices go too quiet. We know how to fix the latter in future. There is no known fix for my numerical skills – I manage to kick this off by claiming we’re playing against six AIs, when the whole point is that we outnumber them.

If the embed above doesn’t work for you, check it out on our YouTube channel.

We’re also turning it into a video anyone can watch, with commentary from us, so stay tuned for that. You can bookmark or subscribe to our Supreme Commander tag (RSS) and it’ll pop up there.

If you’re watching the replay in-game, here are a few things you may need:

• Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
• Patch 1.5.3599
• The Sorian AI mod (smarter AI)
• Cheat Options mod (lets the AI cheat more)

It also has unusually good AI, and this is a story about that.

The Fields of Isis is a map split by mountain ridges. One in the middle divides your possible routes to the enemy base. Two outside each base concentrate all incoming forces into a tight chokepoint, making it easy to defend. I’m fighting a single top-level AI, and I have a plan.

The quickest stuff to build in Supreme Commander is Tech 1: basic tanks and planes, stuff you can pour out of 10 factories at once without your economy flinching. To build anything higher tech takes a major investment to upgrade your factories, but Tech 2 is a hell of a thing once you reach it. You’ve got dozens of weird and interesting things you can build, and it’s all brutally efficient: units that cost 3 or 4 times as much are 10 to 15 times more powerful, and that’s incredibly satisfying to see in action.

Tech 2 turrets, in particular, are amazing. SupCom’s not usually a game about rushing, so defensive structures are vastly more powerful than offensive ones of the same cost. If you get to Tech 2 before your opponent, and you build turrets instead of units, they will obliterate everything.

That’s my plan. But I’m not going to make my chokepoint into a killing field, I’m going to do it to his.

This is basically impossible: you can’t get to the enemy’s chokepoint before he leaves it, and if you upgrade to Tech 2 straight away, you can’t afford anything much to defend your own territory. Apart from anything, Tech 2 turrets take time to build – your engineers would get shredded by the enemy army long before they finished one.

If something’s impossible in Supreme Commander, you get your commander to do it. He can take on a small army alone, he can explode with the force of a nuclear bomb, and he happens to be an engineer on the side. But it’s a big map, and the commander isn’t fast. By the time I walked him over there, and got the resources together to upgrade him to build Tech 2 stuff, the enemy would have an army easily capable of shredding him. And I’d need him at home to help upgrade my factories anyway.

So my actual plan is a bit ambitious. I keep my commander at home, build an air factory, and get it to Tech 2 as soon as possible. That lets me build an air transport big enough to carry him, and tough enough to survive any Tech 1 interceptors that try to bring it down. While that’s building, I upgrade the commander himself to be able to construct Tech 2 stuff. That finishes around the same time the transport completes, so he hops in and flies out to the enemy’s front door to build a forward base.

It’s tricky, but the economics of it just about work out. My commander finishes upgrading a little early, which frees him up to help build the transport. The enemy has taken a terrifying amount of the map by this point, but he’s still only churning out Tech 1 tanks. He’d have to send them all at once to damage my turrets faster than I could build them. So the transport finishes, my commander climbs in, and it carries him out to the front line. This is actually kind of cute, it holds him the way a cat holds a kitten: dangling limply by its neck.

The moment he lands, I change my mind. I don’t want a turret first, I want a shield. They’re slightly quicker to build, and once up, I can build turrets inside their radius without anything punching through to stop me. They drain a lot of power, but I think my engies at home can ramp up their generator production to handle it.

Again, the economics just about work out. I’ve been playing Supreme Commander for so long that I’ve actually started to read the tooltips about how much things are going to cost me, so I crash my economy less these days. The second the bubble pops up around my commander, I have him build a line of Tech 2 turrets right at the barrier.

It works spectacularly. The range on these things is huge, so most stuff doesn’t even get close enough to trouble my shield. I build two more shields just in case, and one anti-air turret, then start building factories. I’m not going to use them yet, just upgrade them all to Tech 3 so I can eventually build an army tough enough to punch through the enemy’s own defenses.

I even take some risks, upgrading my commander with some combat improvements and having him stray into the enemy base to take out a few minor buildings on its perimeter. Appropriately, that’s when I notice my base is gone.

I had wondered why my economy seemed to be going down rather than up, and the explosion of my biggest power generator helps explain it. Most of the rest of my original territory is populated by blackened wrecks or enemy structures. One engineer – one! – got past my anti-air turret in an air transport, landed, and built a Tech 2 turret in my base. It’s still merrily destroying – there’s plenty to shoot at in its vast range.

This would be embarrassing enough if it wasn’t the same tactic I’d just used on them. And it would be bad enough even if I had built a few basic units for emergencies. I have nothing. The only way I can get my economy back is to march there myself – using my commander – and take on that turret in person.

My upgraded commander does beat a Tech 2 turret, but it takes him a while to get there and clean up all the mess. I still have almost all of the map, but my base was the backbone of my economy, and rebuilding is slow. It also takes up all of my attention. So ten minutes later, I’m somewhat surprised by what comes out of the enemy base.

They’ve built a Galactic Colossus. It’s the toughest thing in the game. It’s a humanoid robot the size of a skyscraper that shoots lasers from its face and sucks tanks into its crushing hands. Three Tech 2 turrets and a few shields are not going to stop it.

I have ten Tech 3 assault bots out by this point, so I send those at it too. But realistically, I know nothing I have can take this down. I try telling my factories to send their units to the other side of the map when they come out, to group up there, but it’s not long before the thing’s face-laser has melted the factories too. The enemy didn’t have much to work with, but they put it all into this one gambit, and it’s going to work.

Wait, am I the bad guy here? The story of this war is an amazing tale of resourcefulness and heroism – for the AI. It kind of paints me as the vast oppressive empire, bullying them and stealing their land. The plucky rebels used my own dastardly tactics against me, and did the impossible. They distracted my forces while they built their last, best hope of victory, and won.

I’ve lost, and I think I might have deserved it.

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PC Gamer: That structure was something you moved away from in SupCom 2, I wondered if you considered it a mistake, or just something you hadn’t perfected yet.

Chris Taylor: One of the things that at first I thought was kinda novel, and then wondered if that was the right approach, was designing a game for myself. So Total Annihilation was a game I designed for myself. It was like everything I wanted in an RTS game, I put into Total Annihilation. Units could shoot while they moved, real physics, the fact that stuff was more emergent – based on rule system rather than hardcoded. So there’s a lot of things that I really wanted to do.

But as I went along and as the stakes got higher and as the games got more complex and the teams got bigger, I started thinking to myself: well, maybe I should be designing this game more for the people who are playing it, and not myself. Which I think actually works well. I mean if you talk to some very successful developers and teams, they say “Oh yeah, we sit around for hours and days, and we try out all these different ideas and gather all this feedback, and we do a lot more of that kind of research.”

And so I went more in that direction. And what happens is you get games that can actually sell more. So Supreme Commander sold more units with its somewhat less surprising and quirky game design than Total Annihilation did. So it was kind of true; if you wanted to make a game that people enjoy and wanted to play, you had to pay more attention to what they thought, what they wanted to do. So it works.

But you do lose some of that crazy artistic stuff. Game design is an art. It’s a real challenge. So what we’re doing with AoEO is we’re trying to make sure people are comfortable, and they can jump in and they can play, but then there’s some modes, some boosters, some content that has fresh ideas in it.

Just the fact that we have the Defense of Crete, for example, where you’re playing co-operatively/competitively, you actually have to explain it to someone a few times before they understand exactly what that is. You’re like “No no, you’re playing with a buddy against the computer, which is a comp-stomp, and then you’re going to turn around and you’re going to compete with your other friends – single or in pairs – to beat their score.

So that’s where we’re taking it to some places where people might [say], “Oh yeah, really? That’s an interesting idea.”

So let me answer your question by saying that it’s a mix of both, it’s a mix of doing some fresh things that are kind of interesting and new, and doing some things that are comfortable. So you have one foot in each camp, as you push a design forward.

Previously Chris told us why he thinks Steam’s dominance will shift, why he couldn’t go back from free-to-play games, and why PC gaming is bigger than ever.

On Tuesday we’ll have a podcast of this interview – with both Chris Taylor and Danan Davis of Microsoft Games, so you can hear what else they had to say about PC gaming, Age of Empires Online, Rise of Nations and the future.

Chris designed two of the world’s cleverest strategy games: Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. More recently, he and his company Gas Powered Games took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic. He thinks Steam’s dominance will shift before long.

PC Gamer: What do you think of Steam? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Digital distribution generally seems to be a good thing, but is it bad that Steam has something close to a monopoly?

Chris Taylor: I have games on Steam, I have an account, I buy games there. I have three different digital distribution platforms on my PC, it’s driven mostly from the game I want to play. If it’s on there, if it’s exclusive, it narrows the field. I actually don’t generally have to do a whole lot of soul-searching.

Your question though was what do I think of the fact that it’s taken a footing? It’s obviously extremely popular. Kudos go to the Valve guys for having the vision to build it. And they made a big bet – they made a big, scary bet, and they get rewarded for that.

Ask me the question about where they are in the market five years from now: I think it’s gonna shift. I think the playing field’s gonna level out. Because exclusive content drives it. I mean once upon a time we had a Sega console. There was a company called Atari that had a big market position. It changes and it shifts based on the way the company continues to evolve and interact with its customers, the service it delivers.

I think that now we’re seeing so many new players come, they have to come to the market with their first party games. And if they deliver really outstanding games, the platform follows. So I think it’s all gonna work out in the end. But like I said, you’ve got to give kudos to those guys for jumping in and being first and doing a really good job, and taking a chance.

Previously Chris told us why he couldn’t go back from free-to-play games, and why PC gaming is bigger than ever. Tomorrow we’ll have his thoughts on Total Annihilation, and why his priorities changed as he moved on to Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander 2.

More recently, he and his company Gas Powered Games took over development of Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play version of the old classic. Here are his thoughts on why the platform has never been stronger.

PC Gamer: I’d like to ask you how you feel about the general state of PC gaming. We’re kind of at a weird time where sometimes it’s all doom-and-gloom and piracy is ruining everything, but then we’ve also got stuff like Steam, and it’s getting much easier for new developers to get something out there. Is this an exciting time for PC gaming, or a scary time?

Chris Taylor: It’s pure excitement, there’s no question. That’s an easy one.

PC gaming had one problem. We had a retail presence problem because we started to get into this transition, we lost retail space, so there was this reaction to that, so less product went into development. But I don’t know who was taking stock, because between The Sims, and World of Warcraft, and what’s happened in China with PC gaming, what’s happened in terms of PC games being played in the social and casual space, it’s all around us.

I think PC gaming went from a “Huh, is there a problem here?” To “Oh, not only is there not a problem, but PC gaming is bigger than ever.” It just had to go through a little bit of a reinvention.

The piracy problem is gonna be all but solved as we emerge here, and I think the new question is – which I love – is “What’s the future of console gaming?”

And I used to joke about that last year, when people were interviewing me. Off the record, I was going “You know, they should really be asking about the future of console gaming.”

Now people are. This question is starting to come up. And I was like “Ah, I don’t know – but that’s your problem. Don’t look at me.” I don’t have to answer that question, because I know what the answer for PC gaming is now, and I have a PC gaming company, right? I make PC games. And I’m about as happy about where we’re at as an industry and as a platform than I’ve ever been.

Yesterday we heard why Chris couldn’t go back from free-to-play now, and tomorrow we’ll have his thoughts on Steam and the future of digital distribution.

But far from being a stopgap between full-priced games, Chris says that working with the free-to-play model has convinced him it’s the future of the entire real-time strategy genre, and gaming in general. He says whatever he makes next will inevitably end up using it too. I tackled him to the ground in London recently, and demanded to know why.

PC Gamer: Are you just totally sold on that [free-to-play] model now?

Chris Taylor: I am so sold on that model! I am so ready to tell you that this is the future. Games will never be the same again now that we’re onto this way of approaching it.

And it changes, believe it or not, the way we design from the beginning. Not just the way we think about the game after, it changes the way we build the game to start with.

PC Gamer: So if you were making the next game in the logical sequence from Total Annihilation to Supreme Commander, you would do it as a free to play thing?

Chris Taylor: No matter what I tried to do, I would end up here. Because it’s the right way to go. I mean, people would be so crushed to hear they can’t play co-operative quests, to hear they couldn’t play all these modes we’ve got. They’re just going to ask for them. They’re just going to flat-out say, “Where are they?”

You play a quest – let’s say you don’t win. It happens. But you got all the stuff you collected, all the experience points you get, you get it all. So it’s cumulative. So the more you play, the more stuff you get.

It’s a great experience, very rewarding. I saw that model emerging in other places, it was popping up here and there, it was bursting through. It’s like nature, it’s just coming through all the cracks and crevices. But to see it full on now, it’s pretty clear. I don’t want to play a game and set the game down and have nothing to show for it. I have to have accumulated something for all that investment of time.

PC Gamer: So is AoEO what Gas Powered are doing for the next X years?

Chris Taylor: Yeah. We have other things, smaller things but other things going on. The great bulk of the company is working on Age of Empires Online, and we will be for, hopefully, years and years to come. There’s no telling, there’s no seeing totally into the future, but that’s the plan.

We’ll have Chris’s thoughts on the state of PC gaming tomorrow.