You clearly know nothing about metrics, let alone that a download is uninstalled five mins later. By your submission, anything purchased/downloaded, can be returned/deleted five mins later.

What do metrics have to do with it? I'm talking about whether the downloads are being downloaded on a whim, or whether they're being downloaded by people that are already fans or will become fans.

Apart from that, if you actually stopped for a minute and engaged your brain (at least the part which works and not under the influence of a controlled substance) you'd actually note that those games are MANY MANY MANY years OLD. If they were as you say, then they wouldn't be downloaded at all, let alone be in a download chart. What you're suggesting is that there is a dearth of other worthy games out there.

The age argument is irrelevant. A few years back, Rockstar started offering GTA2 for free. That game is older than BCM, and about the same age as BC2.0. Quite a few people (I don't have numbers, since I don't work for Rockstar) downloaded the game (as well as the other ones Rockstar released for free), and at least some of them did so on a whim. I certainly did. I had never played GTA2 before it was released for free, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Gamers who have broadband without bandwidth/download quotas are not very picky about what they download. If they see a game available free (especially ones as well-known as GTA2 and BC), they're very likely to try it out, even with relatively little interest in the actual game. It's quite possible that they'll play it for a short time and uninstall it.

On the flipside of this, if people were already interested in your games, don't you think they would have picked them up before you released them for free several years later? It stands to reason that a substantial portion of people who download a game when it's made available for free were not interested in it enough to pay money for it prior to its free release.

By the way, you wanna talk about having no basis in reality? How about this little quote:

In fact, just last week both the legacy BC3K v2.0 and BCM held the top five spots on Fileplanet. As of this minute, they are still in the top ten.

Where you failed to mention that BC3K v2.0 and BCM held the top ten spots in the space category, suggesting instead that they held the top ten spots overall. It doesn't take a genius to see that the space sim genre is not exactly seeing an abundance of new games. That accomplishment is not nearly as impressive as you made it seem.