| Munkeh111 said: Yes, but retailers will start taking pre-orders long before they actually order their copies of the game, so they will know roughly how many copies to pre-order, and if there are 1m pre-orders, it shows that this game will sell well in EU, and will probably be in the top few selling PS3 games for now |
That completely depends on the kind of game we are talking about - this is GT5, therefore many gamers will preorder it because it really is a core game; only true core gamers will buy a copy of a demo version of a game and most preorders come from core gamers - the percentage of preorders increases the more hardcore a game is.
I still agree, though, that retailers have a good idea of how good a game will sell - I just wanted to say that these are clearly retail preorders - if those were preorders by customers that would mean 1/4 of all European PS3 owners preordered the game, which is insane - additionally the game should sell after week one and I don´t think it will sell 2 million copies with a 4.5 million install base... (keep in mind, we have "Others" numbers, Sony is solely talking about Europe, therefore the install base is even smaller).
In general you shouldn´t trust statements of companies 100% if they advertise their games - it is also possible Sony is adding the bundled versions of the game to this number.
Gran Turismo 4 sold 5 million copies in "Other" regions - I´d expect the prologue version to sell less than half of this. Additionally the install base is much smaller, so I´d expect the main (!) game (not the prologue version) to sell a maximum of 3 million copies in Europe (3.5 million in total "Others") as this would be in line with the decreases of Nintendo games during the N64 / GC era - significantly smaller install base means less software sales, therefore 3 million for the main game seems reasonable to me. For the prologue version, I don´t have a clue but don´t expect it to be much higher than 1 million. Of course I could be wrong.
