We won't have a real good idea until just after June 30th when the sales statements come in.

We know roughly how many have shipped at this point -- around 120,000 units worldwide.  But what % has been sold is still a guess.

One thing I've learned from this is that the NPD figures can't be trusted.  We waited to see where on the top 20 in March GalCiv II would be and we didn't even make the list. I don't know what stores they're measuring but clearly they're not counting very much the ones we're in since in March we were in the top 5 at Walmart, Best Buy, CompUSA, EB, and Gamestop.  I know games are sold in lots of other places but I don't know of any places in NA that were selling massive quantities.

My guess is that the game will end up selling around 200,000 units when it's all done which would be fantastic.  Especially for a turn-based PC strategy game.  It would definitely make the case for a GalCiv III. 

Sales figures are always problematic becuase it all depends on what you count as a sale. I'm only counting full-priced units.  Sometimes you'll hear someone say they sold 700,000 or something of their game where you haven't heard of the game. And it turns out that they sold 50,000 regular copies and then 650,000 copies were licensed.  In the OS/2 days, we "sold" 500,000 copies of a game called Star Emperor.

But anyway, we're pretty jazzed at the sales. They're well beyond what we had hoped we would be.  By this point in GalCiv I's life I we had shipped approximately 15,000 units. So we're at about 8 times GalCiv I's level.

My estimates do tend to be low -- given that I thought that GalCiv 1 would only sell 30,000 copies and our hope for GalCiv II would be to sell 75,000 copies.

The first GalCiv sold around 150,000 copies but that number needs a big * because about half of those copies were sold at a steep discount or in bundles and what not.  The first GalCiv sold something like 50,000 full-priced retail boxes and another 25,000 or so discounts in North America plus some number overseas that we have a "Best guess" of.

What determines sales more than anything is distribution.  I think we're setting the stage to make sure that GalCiv II stays on shelves longer. But Stardock, as a publisher, still has a lot to learn about how to get its stuff onto more shelves.  So far in April, Civ IV has outsold GalCiv II overall even though GalCiv II outsells Civ IV in the actual stores that they are both in most of the time (Civ IV's been out a lot longer).  So it does show the importance of wide distribution.

For example, only in the past 2 weeks has GalCiv II started being available through US military bases. According to the US military, strategy games like GalCiv can sell many tens of thousands of units. But we weren't available until this past week or two through them.  There's tons of other places that, when added up make for a large number.