The websites and print magazines base their sales list on market reports from NPD (
http://www.npd.com). They are a market research firm that tracks sales through major outlets in the US and Canada. Access to the raw data they collect is on a subscription basis only, and is very expensive - several thousand dollars each year.
The industry generally prefers to use the NPD sales data over publisher provided data because it makes it easier to compare apples to apples. NPD only reports sell-through numbers, and they track a known footprint in North America. Publishers usually inflate their sales numbers to include sell-in (how many copies of a game they sold to distributers/retailers instead of how many copies of the game were actually bought by end users) and low-cost SKUs for OEM bundles. (By the time I left Interplay OEM, I think we had bundled about 6 million OEM copies of Descent 2: Destination Quartzon. That's way, way,
way more than D2 ever sold through retail.) In addition, each publisher releases games to a slightly different set of stores throughout the world. Some games get major promotion in Europe, others are big in Korea or Japan, still others are only pushed in the US and Canada.
It's still too early to tell how sales are going. If I had to guess, I'd predict a moderate success in terms of volume, thought possibly not enough to make back six years of development costs. No idea how big their budget was, but I'm sure it was a whole heck of a lot.
--milo
www.starshatter.com
Wed Mar 12, 2003 4:09 am 
