I really don't think retailers will have so many copies in stock at the moment. They have sales trend information for 7-8 months for the title now so they should be able to make a good estimation how many copies they sell per week. They might have stock for a few weeks and with the Olympics coming they might have a bit more, but 2.5M copies would be equal to sales of the last 4 months or something like that.

Hmm perhaps, but then I am pretty positive they need more stock of a game like M&S than for the X360, perhaps am just biased by the UK's love of this game, whenever I go into a VG store there are always lots of M&S on shelves, and I doubt they have more than a few X360s per store, and they will only be in VG stores, wheras M&S is stocked up in places like Currys and Comet and PCWorld as well.


I don't know how many stores there are in Japan that sell Video Games, but if they only have a few weeks (say 3-4) of supply of the game then that's only about 5000 copies.... I would imagine a place like Japan has more than 5000 stores selling games, and I doubt they have less than 1 copy per store.

Also something to keep in mind is that VGchartz software isn't always the most reliable. ioi can nail it sometimes, but other times it can be off from other sources (such as sega themselves in this case) by quite a bit.

Why do they need to have more stock of games than of systems? Worldwide 360 is selling 100-150k a week every single week, which is more than Mario & Sonic for both platforms combined. And the UK might indeed give you a false impression, cause it seems to be the best performing market for the title.

And in Japan stores might just stop restocking a title when sales fall down to selling 1 copy every few weeks. Only major stores might still restock the game, but smaller outlets will probably just focus on titles selling well enough to put on their limited shelve space.

It's the Olympics next month. Perhaps retailers expect increased sales to start soon, so they need excessive stock to meet demand when the time comes? It wouldn't be a permenant oversupply in that case.

Last week it sold 100k between both the Wii and DS version, so even if sales tripple it would end up selling 300k per week. Having around 1M to 1.5M in stock would already give them enough stock for sales of 3 to 5 weeks and that is if sales go up by that much which I find doubtful. Having 2.5-3M copies at storeshelves really is way too much.

When the Olympics starts this game will have a huge spike in sales again. Watch.

well we will se definitely mario & sonic at the winter olympic games.

Sounds like another title with Balance Board support!

Good that Sega have such a big hit, they need the money. Should help them quite a lot this FY as it's basically all profit now.