How many copies will Sega report sold?

[the_eye]

Assuming they do so, how many copies of Total War: Attila do you think Sega will report as being sold in their first post-release quarterly report?

For comparison, here are the sales reports following release of all Total War titles since Empire: Total War:
Empire: Total War - page 21, 810,000 units
Napoleon: Total War - not specified, presumably fewer than the 560,000 units the smallest 'major title' shipped on page 21
Total War: Shogun 2 - page 25, 600,000 units
Total War: Shogun 2 - Fall of the Samurai - not specified, presumably fewer than the 550,000 units the smallest 'major title' shipped on page 21, probably significantly less given that only 950,000 units were shipped in total across 5 PC titles (page 20), and the majority of those were probably Football Manager 2012 (page 21).
Total War: Rome II - page 18, 800,000 units.

[GrnEyedDvl]

Well over a million.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-games-selling

Top of the tree is Creative Assembly's strategy game Total War: Rome 2, which sifted 1.13 million copies across Europe and North America. Despite the game being divisive for many players, it was a commercial success. Soon after the game launched in September 2013 its concurrent player number on Steam tripled that of predecessor Shogun.

[PlPs]

Over a million.

[Butan]

Too much for our own good. But I bet on less than Rome 2: those who bought it wont be easily tricked, and those who will hear what a mess was Rome 2 wont dive in as much.
It will still hit "a new population" thanks to the "commercial success" and wider audience, but the critic failure should have a negative consequence.

Voted between 700 and 800k units.

[RogueLeader]

I think the number will be low you guys there are a lota angry people out there, and to be honest I just dont throw money away. I think of TW games as an investment and I hope to get years of enjoyment from them, and Rome 2 sure didnt give me that.

[Gromovnik]

Probably over 9000.

[GrnEyedDvl]

I think the number will be low you guys there are a lota angry people out there, and to be honest I just dont throw money away. I think of TW games as an investment and I hope to get years of enjoyment from them, and Rome 2 sure didnt give me that.

Define "lots" here, because I think you are projecting your personal opinion onto other people and have absolutely no statistical evidence of this. Even on TWC I would argue the number of people that are "angry" is pretty low, and we allow people to be more vocal than the official forums. We have had 145,000 members login and post on the site this year. I know this because I just pulled a bunch of stats for something inside Hex where I pulled the number of people who's Last Post in the database was after Jan 1 2014. Anyways, there certainly haven't been 145,000 angry people posting in the Rome 2 section. There haven't even been 1000. Its more like a couple of hundred people posting the same crap continuously, and you are overblowing and magnifying their significance.

[The Useless Member]

+GED forums represent only a percentage of players.

I personally think it'll be slightly higher than Rome showing no substantial amount of growth.

[wulfgar610]

Attila looks very promising compared to Rome2. From the looks of those figures Sega does a "print run" of licenses to a set figure and "sells" them to a 3rd party who profits when they are sold to local distributors/consumer. They have no shortage of third party investors in Japan. They did a large run of Empire of 800,000 and eventually those sold out, and did a second "print run" that took sales to over a million.
Attila looks designed to take in medieval enthusiasts and misses out of the glory days of the late Roman army in the 4th century. But still it is an exclusive area of history so an initial "print run" of 600,000 would be my bid.

[GrnEyedDvl]

+GED forums represent only a percentage of players.

Exactly right. Trying to judge the feelings (positive or negative) of the community at large via a few forum posts on a dozen websites, with TWC obviously being the biggest one, isn't the best way to do it. They can and do get lots of suggestions from this site and other ones, and they do take into account what is said about likes and dislikes, but at the end of the day the sales is what matters.

CA and other game companies have lots of ways to track things, one of the big ones being time played via Steam. If they sell a million copies and average game time is like 1 hour, there is a huge problem. People played the game for an hour and shut it off to go play something else. If they sell a million copies and average game time is hundreds of hours, and they can compare that to past releases not only of their own games but other platforms as well, then they can get a real feel for how people like the game.

I want to make sure everyone knows I am not privy to stats like that, I just want everyone to consider them. I have to do much the same thing when I make decisions about the forum structure. Ok so feature x pissed off 50 people that commented on it. Out of the 13,000 people who have logged in within the last 2 weeks its a drop in the bucket. Sometimes the minority is very vocal and the majority is fairly silent, and it irritates the hell out of me when people project their own opinion onto the masses because a handful agree with them.

I personally think it'll be slightly higher than Rome showing no substantial amount of growth.

You could be right.

[Butan]

Stop derailing plx.

[RogueLeader]

Define "lots" here, because I think you are projecting your personal opinion onto other people and have absolutely no statistical evidence of this. Even on TWC I would argue the number of people that are "angry" is pretty low, and we allow people to be more vocal than the official forums. We have had 145,000 members login and post on the site this year. I know this because I just pulled a bunch of stats for something inside Hex where I pulled the number of people who's Last Post in the database was after Jan 1 2014. Anyways, there certainly haven't been 145,000 angry people posting in the Rome 2 section. There haven't even been 1000. Its more like a couple of hundred people posting the same crap continuously, and you are overblowing and magnifying their significance.

No and there have not be 145,000 people saying how awesome the game is either. I can look at game sales over Empire they were signicantly lower after that game for Shogun. I never joined TW center after Empire I never bought shogun because of Empire never being fixed. All 3 of these are facts no opinion here. Would you consider 200,000 less sales for Shogun than Empire {lots} maybe not but I will bet CA thought it was a lot.

[jimlawl]

Sales will probably be under 10,000 after the Rome 2 fallacy, but SEGA will report it as having sold 10 million LOL

[GrnEyedDvl]

No and there have not be 145,000 people saying how awesome the game is either.

They don't have to. As I said earlier, they vote with their wallets and the amount of time they play. Human nature being what it is, you are far more likely to complain about something than you are to praise it. You can see this all over the place. Work, school, politics, you name it. You don't see people marching in the streets because they like something, you see it when they don't like something. For example you don't see people holding a candle light vigil because we are happy that some murderer got executed, but you do see people marching to oppose it. If all you looked at was the amount of people marching about it, then you would conclude that capital punishment was strongly opposed when the facts are much different and approximately 2/3 of the population in any given poll in the US support capital punishment. I don't want to turn this into a political discussion, I just picked something people could easily relate to. This is about human nature, pure and simple.

You are probably far more likely to have a conversation with your boss about something you did wrong, not something you did right unless you did something new and spectacular. The expectation at work is that you do it right, and when you do you are merely doing your job and it doesn't have to be talked about a lot. However when you do something wrong it can have a serious negative impact on the company and it has to be talked about.

With the sidebar on TWC, "lots" of people jumped in and complained about it. Meaning 50 or so. But site traffic and page views per visit were actually up the first two weeks that was in place. If it was truly pissing off that many people, then they wouldn't spend more time on the site than they did before it was there. Especially since Attila had not been announced at that point. Today you could say some of that increase was due to Attila and you would be right, but before that essentially nothing had changed except the sidebar on the site. There wasn't some hot new content to drive new traffic.

The same thing applies here. If 145,000 people were pissed off enough to comment on it, then they would do so. However they didn't. Most of them (more than 99%) read a few threads and made a few posts, a mere handful of them went on rants, and a mere handful of them praised the game to the heavens. So if all you pay attention to is the negative comments then you automatically get the impression that the game is not popular even though it is the highest sold title to date and you have absolutely no access at all to game play statistics.