August YTD PC sales numbers

    NPD just came out with their total US market estimation of Year-to-Date sales through the end of August.

    Here are the top PC game sales of 2004 so far. Keep in mind these are not life to date sales for product that shipped before Jan 2004:

    Doom 3 at 387,460 units (late July 04 launch)

    BF Vietnam at 362,976 units (March 04 launch)

    UT 2k4 at 249,062 units (March 04 launch)

    City of Heroes at 246,688 units (April 04 launch)

    Call of Duty at 230,362 units (Oct 03 launch)

    Far Cry at 213,252 units (March 04 launch)

    Age of Mythology at 199,327 units (Oct 02 launch...wow almost 2 yrs ago)

    Rise of Nations at 184,540 units (May 03)

    so this seems very skeptical to me, like these numbers can't be remotely accurate.

    doom 3 has to have broken a million...

    come to think of it, it had a million PRE ORDERS alone.

    well you have to remeber this doom 3 was vastly much more popular in the UK then it was in the US suprisingly enough. Activision numbers show that it sold more units there then it did in the US. Stilling being the number one game in france, aus, and germany. I think these numbers are not really accuratly saying how good doom 3 did.

    This report does not account for those sales and on top of that it was projected that in 2005 activision could reach a 1 billion dollar revenue largely due to the sales fo doom 3. So i think those numbers are misleading, because they do not show the numbers as a hole, and for those of you who think a billions dollars for a publishing company is no sweat LOL... this last quarter activision only had 216 million dollars in revenue and with 4 quarters and this is assuming that based on past trends they do not take a hit during the spring time( which they normally do seeing as in the past 3 years they have had renevue for q4 at about 112 million bucks) then it only amounts to about 864 million dollars revenue for the year, so a billion dollars is a pretty big milestone and those sales are pretty much being projected based on doom 3 sales along with a view other titles that have been annouced. This is of course world wide.

    keep in mind these are NPD's USA TRST market estimations for 2004 YTD.

    And yes these art NPD's estimations for total US sales. What does that mean? NPD gets scantron reports from most major US PC game retailers (EB, Gamestop, BestBuy, etc, but NOT Walmart). They estimated that their scantron data represents roughly 60 to 70% of the market. That estimation is not always correct and supposedly they modify their estimations now on a per title basis but they aren't required to publicize their formulae. Some titles that do much better or worse at Walmart have grossly skewed numbers in NPD's market estimation.

    For example, I reran that Jan-Aug 2004 PC games report except to not estimate total market and just give the raw scantron data reported by all the participating retailers. Doom3's number came out to 325,466 units, which is 84% of the estimated number of 387,460 (keep in mind, these numbers are for Jan 1 thru Aug 31 2004).

    So to come full circle on Wacko's post, yes, these numbers to not include any sales outside North America. They are are for the "USA" market only (which means USA and Canada).

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