Today something unprecedented happened -- for us anyway. Several retail chains re-ordered more units in a single go than their initial order. EB Canada, for instance re-ordered a very large number. Yay Canada!
See, typically what happens at retail is that you get your initial "sell-in". Re-orders are only designed to bring stocking levels back to that initial sell-in level. So over time, the game fades away. It's very unusual for a game to actually increase its retail stocking after the release.
So now we're in unknown territory. We no longer have any idea how many units the game will sell. The first one sold roughly 75,000 units in North America and roughly that many overseas / electronic. We've shipped around 50,000 so far and we're starting to run into a back order so availability is going to get tight in the coming days as we're now rush manufacturing another batch to handle.
This all happened before the reviews even started to come out. The reviews should certainly help. But it goes to show how powerful word of mouth is. And if there's other small developers out there, bear in mind, Galactic Civilizations II had only 4 full time developers and roughly that many artists on it. If you're at home, open up one of your game manuals and look at the credits to see what's the norm.
Stardock.
