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Yet More Troika Comments on Sales Figures...

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by Taluntain, Mar 3, 2005.

  1. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    ... which could all be summed up with "those reported figures aren't even remotely accurate in terms of overall sales". Reminder: Arcanum - 234k - $8.8 mil, ToEE - 128k - $5.2 mil, Bloodlines - 72k - $3.4 mil.

    Comments from someone at NMA who got in touch with the people who made the original sales figures quotes:

    Quote:
    "I'm sorry they feel this way, but our POS numbers are dead-on. Remember that these sales figures are U.S. only. Maybe this is what has jonaac disputing the numbers?"

    Well here´s their stand. They say it only represents North american figures, and i´ll add that they don´t represent online figures, nor the actual royalty inducing figures, but just an estimate. At least for Arcanum and ToEE, i don`t have a clue on numbers regarding Vampires though.

    He goes on to quote Ken Levine from Irrational:

    And don't forget NPD only covers _roughly_ 60% of the North American market and nothing outside of US and Canada. I say roughly for two reasons:

    1) They don't cover WalMart. My undrestanding is they extrapolate WalMart sales based on hand stock counts by NPD staff at 8 local Wal Marts to NPD.
    2) When they claim to cover 60% of the market, do they mean 60% of gross unit volume, gross revenue, specific retailers, shelf space inches, or what? It's all very unclear, and I'm kinda in the know on these things. I've never had a straight answer from anybody I've every asked from marketing guru to Vice President of whosi-whatsis.

    Point of data: On one of our games, NPD listed 179k units. Our royalty report from the publisher listed nearly 400k units. Using the traditional extrapolation of 60%, that's sales of 252k units to 400k units. Though my publisher may have artificially elevated their financial obligations to us in their royalty report, for some reason I doubt it.

    Here's another few words along with steam that call NPD stats into question:

    Amazon, Walmart.com, EBGAMES.com, etc.

    And a couple of quotes from Leonard Boyarsky of Troika, posted on RPG Codex, explaining a few more things:

    The reason Andrew could see our royalty statements is because we were an open book company - besides sharing good news with our employees (like good sales numbers) everyone knew where we were financially at all times, even when the news was bad.

    and

    I don't have any actual numbers at hand (nor do I know whether I can reveal numbers per our contract, since I don't have that with me at the moment either), but to the best of my knowledge, ToEE was our best seller - or at least our fastest. The reason it's difficult to say is because our numbers were often being adjusted after the fact for arcane business reasons (on the publisher's end). I believe Arcanum is close to ToEE in sales, but Arcanum has been out alot longer and is at a much lower price point. Vampire hasn't been out long enough to really judge how well it will eventually do, as our games tend to continue to sell (as do all RPGs) longer than most.
     
    Taluntain, Mar 3, 2005
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