I think that finding Asian sales numbers for PC games is pretty tough, if not impossible.
Blizzard announced (Jan 2007) that there were 3.5 million subscribers in China. http://www.blizzard.com/press/070111.shtml However, the company that operates WoW in China (The9 Ltd) claimed 4.3 million Chinese users back in May 06. The subscriber number could be substantially lower than physical sales if there's a reasonable rate of user turnover (ie, if any users stop playing after buying it they wouldn't show in the subscriber numbers).
MMOs present an interesting problem for the exchange. The actual sale of the box represents a fraction of what the publisher makes from the game and so predicting sales of it seems pointless (especially considering how hard it is to get PC numbers). If we could get monthly subscriber numbers, it might make more sense to predict that...or just avoid PC MMOs entirely.
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I think that finding Asian sales numbers for PC games is pretty tough, if not impossible.
Blizzard announced (Jan 2007) that there were 3.5 million subscribers in China.
http://www.blizzard.com/press/070111.shtml
However, the company that operates WoW in China (The9 Ltd) claimed 4.3 million Chinese users back in May 06. The subscriber number could be substantially lower than physical sales if there's a reasonable rate of user turnover (ie, if any users stop playing after buying it they wouldn't show in the subscriber numbers).
MMOs present an interesting problem for the exchange. The actual sale of the box represents a fraction of what the publisher makes from the game and so predicting sales of it seems pointless (especially considering how hard it is to get PC numbers). If we could get monthly subscriber numbers, it might make more sense to predict that...or just avoid PC MMOs entirely.