Troika sales article wrong

[Odin]

Andrew Meggs (former Troika designer) stepped in and commented on the recent newsbit about an article on Troika's salesfigures, here's what he said:<blockquote>This is incorrect. By a signficant factor. I was there when the royalty checks came in, and Arcanum did much better than that. I do not think the publisher would have written checks for copies that they hadn't sold.

I never heard a final number on ToEE, as I wasn't directly involved in it, but the number I recall for its first-month sales was more than this article claims it did overall.

I do not know any numbers on Vampire.</blockquote>So there you have it, those salesfigures weren't correct afterall.
Spotted at our forum

 

[SimpleMinded]

Hrm thats interesting. I wonder where the article got its numbers from then... is there any way we'll ever be able to get ACTUAL numbers?

 

[Brother None]

I wonder where the article got its numbers from then...

As Briosa said, it's probably a measurement from a small amount of American retailers multiplied by x. A very rough and guaranteed-to-be-wrong estimate and often undershooting the actual amount. It's the only way to measure game sales available to us, however, unless someone from inside the publisher or developer's company steps out and names numbers, but most companies don't like that, so...

 

[Briosafreak]

Here`s what NPD has to say regarding those numbers:

"I'm sorry they feel this way, but our POS numbers are dead-on. Remember that these sales figures are U.S. only. Maybe this is what has jonaac disputing the numbers?"

Well here´s their stand. They say it only represents North american figures, and i´ll add that they don´t represent online figures, nor the actual royalty inducing figures, but just an estimate. At least for Arcanum and ToEE, i don`t have a clue on numbers regarding Vampires though.

 

[Claw]

Who's NPD, besides an extreme right-wing party in Germany?

 

[Briosafreak]

The guys that produced the numbers that were disputed by Mandrew.

Seems we aren`t the only ones doubting the numbers they produce, here`s someone else from inside the industry:

And don't forget NPD only covers _roughly_ 60% of the North American market and nothing outside of US and Canada. I say roughly for two reasons:

1) They don't cover WalMart. My undrestanding is they extrapolate WalMart sales based on hand stock counts by NPD staff at 8 local Wal Marts to NPD.
2) When they claim to cover 60% of the market, do they mean 60% of gross unit volume, gross revenue, specific retailers, shelf space inches, or what? It's all very unclear, and I'm kinda in the know on these things. I've never had a straight answer from anybody I've every asked from marketing guru to Vice President of whosi-whatsis.

Point of data: On one of our games, NPD listed 179k units. Our royalty report from the publisher listed nearly 400k units. Using the traditional extrapolation of 60%, that's sales of 252k units to 400k units. Though my publisher may have artificially elevated their financial obligations to us in their royalty report, for some reason I doubt it.

Here's another few words along with steam that call NPD stats into question:

Amazon, Walmart.com, EBGAMES.com, etc.

Thanks Dhruin for the quote.

 

[Maphusio]

ahh it makes so much more sence now.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

So how much was the cheque for, eh? Eh? Eh?

 

[Tempistfury]

:: Sigh ::

More or less money, what does it matter if they're out of business and won't be making that really awesome looking Post apoc game? :-\

 

[Maphusio]

I keep watching the video... And I sware they knew ahead of time this was going to fail... The music bed just seems so fitting... Or maybe that was the general mood of the whole post apocoliptic world setting... *shrugs* Still say Beth needs to get in on highering those guys up to work on the new Fallout project.

 

[Briosafreak]

The reason Andrew could see our royalty statements is because we were an open book company - besides sharing good news with our employees (like good sales numbers) everyone knew where we were financially at all times, even when the news was bad.[...]
I don't have any actual numbers at hand (nor do I know whether I can reveal numbers per our contract, since I don't have that with me at the moment either), but to the best of my knowledge, ToEE was our best seller - or at least our fastest. The reason it's difficult to say is because our numbers were often being adjusted after the fact for arcane business reasons (on the publisher's end). I believe Arcanum is close to ToEE in sales, but Arcanum has been out alot longer and is at a much lower price point. Vampire hasn't been out long enough to really judge how well it will eventually do, as our games tend to continue to sell (as do all RPGs) longer than most.

There you have it, posted at RPGCodex