Video game publishers and members of the media alike love to talk about sales statistics. Cited as the only dependable way of gauging a game's success, statistics are often touted in weekly sales charts released by the NPD and mentioned in press releases. One of Hellgate: London's chief selling points, at least in Asia, was that Diablo II had “served 10 million fans” based on certain sales statistics and “countless more” who had probably pirated the game.
Responding to a question from a fan about whether Diablo III might end up as the best selling video game of all time, Blizzard's community manager, Bashiok imparted a few words of wisdom regarding the reality of these figures.
I know that comparing one number to another seems to be a good idea for how to gauge popularity or success of something, but statistics can be shaped and formed to fit any outcome desired. It sometimes takes a lot of research and information to find an actual common ground to compare one number to another.
A lot of these lists do their best to post numbers released by the different companies, but if you look at what the numbers are actually saying you couldn’t accurately compare all of them. In our case not every region that plays World of Warcraft purchases a boxed product, so that coupled with the nature of the game, possibly the “best” number for us to gauge worldwide popularity is through active subscription numbers. For every release we also include a piece of text that explains exactly what we count as an active subscriber, and it’s a very logical, no-pulled-punches way of describing them.
To take that number of subscribers though and compare it to total boxes sold of other games would be inaccurate. These types of lists just don’t wholly exist with an actual baseline to compare them accurately, and that’s not the list maker’s fault, it’s just the nature of business to release a statistic that is favorable to your product.
He also added an additional response to a player who cited the impossibility of Wrath of the Lich King outselling the original World of Warcraft as further proof of the unreliability of such statistics.
Exactly. Because those stats are copies sold within X amount of time, not total copies sold ever. See how these numbers can’t be compared? They’re pulled from press releases and laid out side-by-side with no logical way to compare them, except that they exist.
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