It's possible to sell more copies of a game than your console unit has sold

So after making my own console and then making a hit game for it, I noticed that it outsold the sales of the actual console by a ridiculous margin. Obviously that shouldnt be, and if anything if you make a killer game it should in turn increase console unit sales.

So what if you bought a game (disc version not digital download version) and it broke (scratched, snapped or lost) and you liked it so much, wouldnt you go out and buy another copy?

just saying…

Yeah, but 3 or 4 times? Really? Though it is kinda funny to see your MMO being bought 3 to 6 more times then there are consoles.

I guess the MMO “sales” are more subscriptions fees than actual sales.

If it’s an MMO then it’s probably just that all of the households who bought your console are rich jerks who can afford to shell out separate subscriptions to everyone in the house.

goldfarmer operation in Korea obviously

This is not only the case for MMOs. I’ve outsold my console by over 200% and that one was not an MMO. And I agree that there is no way that you’d get an average of each person buying 4 copies of the same game, especially if the game has only been out for a year or so. It’s just one of those little details that alphas are for really, I’m not at all surprised it was an oversight, pretty minor in the general scheme of things because this game is pretty functional already.

Customers pay “weekly” with an MMO. Your presented with this information as “sales”. They are not new sales though.

Think of your MMO game as a “free to get” game which costs money every week to play.
Expansions are also free, but bring back customers who previously cancelled subscrpition.

This will ofcourse make it look like your sellings millions and millions of new copies. This is not the case.

to be true, i have 3 versions of command and conquer tiberium conflict here.

yes if a game is awesome, you will buy it multiple times if there is a reason for.

for me the reason was that the first version was in an old cd case, the second one in a new dvd box, and the third one with a special disc with new missions.

That’s my flagship MMO, as you can see, I’ve sold enough copies for everyone on the planet to build a house from the boxes.

A “unit” is not a copy of the game when it’s an MMO. A “unit” is a subscription payment which happens every week.

I worked out how many players I must have, if the unit is the subscription every week… and it is 404,181,785,585.

404 Billion copies of the game. Which is ~58 copies (subscriptions) per person, if we are basing that on 7B people on the planet.

So, maybe not a house, but a dog-house.

you ran your game for 27 years in that screenshot.
Thats 1404 weeks

spread across 404 billion subscriptions paid.

That evens out to ~287 million people if spread evenly around.

Now i dont say that MMO’s arent balanced (something is clearly off) but it’s not a “doghouse building material” crazy

Yes, 27 years. With 535,540,865,900,000 subscriptions. 404 billion was the subscriptions, divided by the weeks.

Your right, i misread your screenshot.

Either way, it’s still a ridiculous amount haha. I do have other games which sold 10M+ copies on my own console, which only had 7M units on the market.

I mean, that is possible, as games break etc. but an extra 3M!?

Well, it’s the future. You got to the point where it became legitimate to sell the game to more than humans :3

But aliens don’t want to play a game that was rated a 6 average!!

The game was marketed towards ants.

Joined just to comment that I saw the same thing. And, it was not an MMO where I first noticed it.