Fanboys are obviously a sick, masochistic bunch
(and totally deserving of every rip-off Fony can come up with)... but if I was writing for Ars Technica, I'd think twice before quoting an unsourced figure from BBC.
It wouldn't be the first time BBC is
talking out of its ass (this report is even sourced - and it still has no connection to reality. I was surprised enough by the Helsinki figures to dig out an actual stats from police and interior ministry. The figure quoted by BBC is "only" several times too large. *shrugs*)Only
(at least somewhat) verifiable source I have is this:
http://www.verkkokauppa.com/popups/prodinfo.php?id=6798 and it would seem to suggest that while it sells, it doesn't sell particularly well. When reading that, you have to keep in mind that they'll show all figures larger than 25 as "more than 25" instead of the actual number - to hide some information from competition, I suppose.
So, we know that they have received a minimum of 77 units. It could be lot more, of course. They might have received at least one shipment of 25 or more on Thursday too, I don't remember
(it shows last 5 transactions on both received and sold, so it might be leaving the oldest ones out), so it might be more than 102.
They are still showing
at least 25 unsold at their central warehouse, 3 in one of their actual stores
(they do mostly e-retail via the Internets) and
at least 25 in another of their stores
(out of total of two stores).
Meaning that out of more than 77 received units, they still have more than 53 in stock.
They have sold more than 24, sure... I've been keeping an eye on the latest sales, and it looks like they sold maybe 10 to 20 yesterday and the day before that, maybe about 20 on Saturday and bit more than that on Friday. Today it seems to be that they have sold maybe only 5. That's for their internet sales, the actual stores have sold maybe a handful in that time.
This is the largest IT-etailer in Finland, but it's not very game oriented. Still, it's large enough to give some kind of impression about the actual sales.
I think that to reach 600,000 over the entire Europe, it would have to have almost record breaking sales in every country in Europe. England is the largest video game market in Europe
(I believe, I'm not 100% sure), and the rest keep getting gradually smaller, some because of population, some because of purchasing power. While England is only about 10% of Europe population wise, the market is considerably larger in relation to say... Poland for example
(which has about 80% of England's population, but purchasing power per capita is only 40% of England's... for now, at least).
At the very least it would have had to sell really well in Germany, and France, and I don't think that those two combined with England are anywhere large enough to account for 600,000 sales in total.
