Deus Ex actually sold quite well for the time...3 to 500.000 copies, off the top of my head, which was quite a lot for the time.

As for the console vs. pc sales, I think you got it right with the renting thing, Creston. That is a mayor chunk of sales which the pc misses out on (but something which the dev's are happy for, as they don't see a cent for rented games except the onetime purchase).

However, marketshare is a significant issue; the larger the installed base, the more potential custumors there are. When you're deciding which platform to make your game for, would you choose PS2 or Saturn? Thing is, as I noted before (and one of the reasons HL2 did so well, I expect), the pc has the largest installed base of them all. It's virtually in every home, much more so than the console, even though the specs on most pc's aren't that good.

What I really wonder though is what the pc gaming market is worth compared to the console market. We get lots of cute figures about consoles (so many sold, so much revenue, so many games sold), but funnily enough I haven't seen much data on pc's; hell, we and all the publishers and dev's might be making a hell of a wrong assumption here that the pc market is smaller than the console market. I do know that installed base, the pc >> all consoles. If that's the case for games...it's real odd that I don't know that...I just know what the marketing hype has been putting out...but that's one-sided data/hype concerning consoles.