I thought it could go either way, but I was betting on Alan Wake. Definitely never expect HR to more than double AW's sales though.

I was just wondering how well heavy rain and anlan wake were advertised

Yeah, I also thought Alan Wake would outsell Heavy Rain, though I did think Heavy Rain would outscore Alan Wake.

The results surprised me. Nobody thought it would sell so well. And I'm very glad I was wrong.

All of those "prediction" posts linked were essentially Fan Boy wish posts, and by that I mean predictions based not upon sales projections from their respective publishers or any type of hard data pertaining to pre-orders, but simple "A" will sell better than "B" because "A" is on the console I'm most emotionally attached to and "B" is a clear competitor targeting a similar demographic.

The simple facts are Heavy Rain outperformed industry projections and Alan Wake underperformed. There is no spin.

While I bought and finished both games shortly after release, I think I enjoyed Alan Wake a bit more than Heavy Rain (DLC helped).

This does not change the fact that Alan Wake should have sold a lot better for what it is and the amount of time and care than went into it.

And no, it had nothing to do with the lack of marketing or hype; Microsoft pushed Alan Wake as an Xbox exclusive to the extreme where they had Remedy cancel the PC (read: original) version of the game.

Microsoft lied.

They said that there will be a monster marketing campaign for Wake. This, along with the massive hype, and the fact that Heavy Rain was very different made me believe that it would outsold HR.

A rational person isn't the one that make the right choices but the one that make the right choice based on the  informations given.

Well, fortunately i was wrong. Heavy Rain deserves it. This is the type of game that sells only on Playstation, and it is the proof that PS innovated in gaming, by bringing serious and cinematics experiences never saw before.

and you will also notice that non of them will enter this thread and just pretend it does not excists

Low replay value for Alan Wake most likely hurt sales, regardless of quality (which was not "voted" by reviewers as the AAA game Xbox fans hyped it out to be).

If you simply wanted the most quality value for a limited gaming budget, RDR was more or less impossible to beat, especially compared to a game that could easily be finished in one weekend.

Considering how many people were supposedly hyped for Alan Wake (or at least hyped about hyping Alan Wake for the Xbox 360's sake), it should have sold to a lot more gamers regardless unless it turned out to be the most rented 360 game of the month instead.

It's true that no one expected this outcome. I saw more ads for Heavy Rain, in fact MS have been a little muted in advertisement this year. Mass 2 and Crackdown 2 came and went. The ad bucks are likely being saved for Reach/Kinect.

What's this? People on the internet were wrong about something? Get out.

Same thing happened as with the statement "Ps3 will outsell 360 in 2009, 2010, 2011..."

People were wrong...