The sky isn't falling. A numbers based view.

Dont have a link and im not going to bother wasting my time looking for it again. They stated 2.4 millions sold. That included digital sales iirc. You make an assumption that those were not installed but thats an assumption. They never said they were not installed, they simply said they didnt convert to a paid account. A sale is a sale reguardless on if they sub or not. If they do not sub then it is still a loss of retention. Its unlikely that someone would pay 50 to 150 bucks and let it sit on the shelf.

Dont have a link and im not going to bother wasting my time looking for it again. They stated 2.4 millions sold. That included digital sales iirc. You make an assumption that those were not installed but thats an assumption. They never said they were not installed, they simply said they didnt convert to a paid account. A sale is a sale reguardless on if they sub or not. If they do not sub then it is still a loss of retention. Its unlikely that someone would pay 50 to 150 bucks and let it sit on the shelf.

TUXs, .. I have been "googling" off and on all morning and I have yet to find the over all initial box numbers for WoW. I have seen the "first month" articles which are something like intial sales of vanilla at 240k in first month with 100k active players in that first month ( which was HUGE back in the day). I guess if you measure just the first month of vanilla WoW vs. SWTOR, SWTOR kicked WoW's butt?

World of Warcraft breaks the recordsWithin the first day, over 200,000 players created World of Warcraft accounts. By 5:00 p.m. PST, over 100,000 were playing the game concurrently. These two record-breaking numbers made World of Warcraft the fastest-growing MMORPG in history. Within a single day, all original 40+ World of Warcraft servers were filled to capacity, and by the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, more than 40 additional servers were deployed to meet the rapidly growing player base, as the number of new accounts and concurrent users continued to grow."We were all extremely pleased with the success of World of Warcraft on its first day of launch," said Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment. "Once we saw the numbers for the first day, we knew that we had to immediately increase capacity to accommodate the huge numbers of players joining our game. We're glad so many people are enjoying World of Warcraft, and we are dedicated to supporting a fun and smooth game experience for everyone."Retailers across North America reported that the World of Warcraft launch was unequivocally their biggest day-one sales in PC gaming history. Leading industry retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy, EB, and GameStop, all reported that hundreds of their stores sold out of World of Warcraft within the first day."World of Warcraft has once again shown that Blizzard consistently delivers the best games in the industry," said Robert McKenzie, vice president of merchandising at GameStop. "It sold better than any other PC game this year – in fact, World of Warcraft enjoyed the best day-one sell-through GameStop has ever seen on a PC title!"Over the Thanksgiving weekend, players continued to buy World of War

Consider turning up your brightness, haven't had any complaints beforehand, or perhaps it's your eyesight, regardless, that's an excellent way to debate my point.

This is my point though. Companies would, a lot of the time, say they 'sold' a certain amount - it looks a lot more impressive to say 'we sold 1m copies' when in reality they'd sold that 1m into retail but had only really sold 500k to consumers.

Which makes a sale not always a 'sale'

As you yourself say, " Its unlikely that someone would pay 50 to 150 bucks and let it sit on the shelf."

I completely agree with you. And for that reason the 700k that did not sub at all has always not sat right with me and made me think they are literally the copies still sat on the shelf at retail.

Thanks for the response.

QS

I don't disagree with you here. That's not the point of contention. I originally intended to do a box sale to sub retention comparison and there is no data available.

In that context the number adjusted for that is completely meaningless. I hope you understand what I mean.

A publicly traded company cannot lie like that. It would be against the law.

A publicly traded company cannot lie like that. It would be against the law.