America Up!

[Reasonable]

kowenicki said:

Reasonable said:

Barozi said:
Americas Preorders Chart, 23rd Jan 2010:

Mass Effect 2 - 475,782
MAG: Massive Action Game - 245,491

I knew the preorder charts were too high for MAG
Still a good start.

I suspect the Beta gathered MAG most of its buyers, while some who placed pre-orders didn't like the Beta and cancelled.  I'm not sure the pre-order totals get decremented as well as incremented.

Either that or the number was way high, but it's actually closer to final sales than ME2 pre-orders, so I think it's more likely at a point it looked like MAG had accumulated 250 K pre-orders but no-one was decrementing the 50K who changed their mind and cancelled.

 

Well of course, but it would have been a lot more than 50k that cancelled their pre-orders, unless we think that every one sold was pre-ordered..... which I suppose is possible.

It's more of a hunch to be honest.  I look at an FPS in US with current PS3/360 install and the fact it's clear a lot of the core FPS players are on 360, and I figure sales will be low, particularly for something like MAG that is in many ways a niche online FPS.  I therefore figure that a large percentage (not all of course) of buyers would have been on the Beta and liked it, formed clans, etc. or passed on word of mouth to some friends (driving the percentage of non Beta purchases is my guess).

I'm assuming that in US you can switch a pre-order if you do it early enough - i.e. I've decided I don't want MAG after all I'll have a bit of Mass Effect 2 instead

The number could just have been too high, but that implies all the pre-order numbers are pretty unreliable.  I'm therefore considering what might have caused the impression of higher pre-orders than the final position - for example people cancelling pre-orders and switching them because they didn't like the Beta or word of mouth about it.

I'm actually surprised MAG got around 200K allowing for percentage error.  I thought it would be less initially with the game having legs if it got a strong, deveoted following.