| Deyon said: Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time had over 100k pre-orders in the US and sold 88k? O,o |
Can't speak about the accuracy of the site's figures, but it's not uncommon for pre-ordered copies of games to not get picked up. Especially with retailers like GameStop pushing pre-orders on people with special trade-in deals (ie, pre-order the game and get 10% extra on your trade-ins, which can more than pay for the pre-order if you're trading in enough, so why not even if you don't care about the game?).
This happened all the time when I worked at GameStop. Some people will make smart use of trade-in deals (or rather, the salesman will push them to do the deal to pad their reserve numbers - fucking quotas), some people will reserve and forget, some people will end up picking the game up at another store and come back and cancel their reserve later, forget to cancel their reserve at all, decide to wait for a price drop and apply their reserve then, and so on and so forth.
It really depends on the game. Something like Call of Duty will have large numbers of unfulfilled reserves, yet will have even larger numbers of walk in buyers its first week that never reserved in the first place. With smaller games that like Sly that probably have a buying base that will either definitely get the game or pass on it for awhile, you're likely to see a higher % of reserves to buyers, with the potential for "fake" reserves over and above that padding the numbers, with no casual buyers to cancel those out.
