| mrstickball said: I think the advantage is that Gears 2 *did* release near a weekend, where most gamers buy games, and play over the weekend. Also, it has the advantage of getting 2 full weekends of sales before Week-2 is out. I really don't think having an extra 3 days of weekdays is going to give Gears 2 some sort of insane boost. Here's the way I look at it *assuming it is as frontloaded as Halo 3*: Halo 3: 1.8m First Day 3.8m First Week (5 days) 4.597m in 12 days
Grand Theft Auto IV: Ukn First Day 3.4m First Week (5 days) 4.265m in 12 days Looking at Day-0 Gears data, it's in between GTAIV and Halo 3 in the best case scenario, and at worst, at 80% of Halo 3 for launch sales (or 1.45m on day-0). The other aspects to take into consideration is/are Week 3 data. Assuming sales keep going down, both GTAIV and H3 saw 50% drops from Week-2 to Week-3. To me, that means that sales may not be that insanely hot (by comparison) after the 2nd weekend. If that's the case, then I don't think that the extra 3 days of sales would help a whole bunch (on average, both GTAIV and H3 sold 50,000-70,000 units per day on week 3. Which would put the 3 day advantage of a 2 week cycle between 150,000-300,000 units lower than either comparison, which I think is likely since the missing days are weekdays, and not weekend days). So putting that forth, we should look at these plausible scenarios:
So the middle of the road scenario would be between 3,817,000 and 3,877,000 units in 9 days. |
Well releasing near a weekend, in theory would help. I know a common problem of most who buy these games is simply trying to find the transportation and or time from work get the title on a weekday. So they'd instead wait for the weekend. Of course I wouldn't suspect this to be a vast majority but it could potentially make its day 2 sales a little larger than per se a game that released on a Tuesday and day 2 was on a Wednesday. So if it was about 1.45 million then instead of the usual half we could say about another million in day 2 which would suggest about 2.5 million in its first 2 days. Thus in the next week we'd see the usual decreases in sales which would put it's second week to about 700k to 1 million. Which fits right about where you have your Worst case. I'd probably call that my moderate case and the worst case to be in about 2.8-3.2 million.
As for my best cae it's what I explained earlier so more like a 1.7 million opener and 1.1 million second day for 2.8 million first week. And then of course around 1.2 million in the 2nd week for a total of 4 million. I'd give it a tolerance of 200k. \
It's good to be able to discuss these kinds of sales with someone who knows what they are talking about... no more explaining processes before I make such predictions haha. But I think we are personally on the same page it's just we have a different idea of a median. While mine is more around 3.4 million yours is more around 3.8 million for the first 2 weeks. Either way it's an outstanding 9 day opener on any accounts and I think it just further proves my assumption that the growth in the market is allowing this to happen for such games in the holiday season.
