mass effect - 1 million copies sold?

[albionus]

erikers said:

sinha said:
"We've... seen a strong response to both Halo 3 sales with more than 5 million, and Mass Effect which has sold more than a million copies in less than three weeks," noted Bell, highlighting consumers' reaction to Microsoft's holiday push.

MS
Halo 3: > 5,000,000
Mass Effect: > 1,000,000

vgchartz
Halo 3: 5,819,045
Mass Effect: 557,356

Why would they be giving "sold to consumers" numbers for Halo 3, but "sold to retailers" numbers for Mass Effect?

 Stop making too much sense with logic.  I'm warning you, people will start to get angry here.

I don't know about making me angry but it is flawed logic.  >5 million means 5.8 million and every single number up to infinity.  That means if MS is referring to sold to retailers and has sold say 6.2 million to retailers then it is >5 million.  Why wouldn't MS say >6 million? Perhaps because 5 million is a nice round number (this is a press release I take it) or perhaps VGChartz is overtracking Halo 3 sales by a half a million or so (thereby putting Halo 3 shipped under 6 million). 

Something to note, for the cases of GoW or Halo 3 for example, fast selling games (and consoles) will have shipped figures that approximate sold to customer figures very quickly.  Slower selling games (and consoles) will take noticeably longer.  Given that it is backed by MS, hyped, and the constant ads I see I would guess MS expected it to sell very well which could mean a lot of unsold stock sitting on store shelves and a sold to customer stat that isn't as close to sold to retailer like Halo 3.  I'm not saying that is the case but seeing as VGChartz has been overtracking everything 360 lately I would be surprised to learn that they undertracked Mass Effect.  We'll find out what is happening soon enough.