FINAL FANTASY XIII celebrates its 5th anniversary today!

[Sora96]

Let's understand something here.

When a publisher announces how many units they have sold in something like a PR statement (FFXIII selling 7 million for example), that number will always be shipped. From the perspective of a publisher, "shipped" is "sold" because their customer are retail chains.

That number will always be talking about how many copies a publisher has produced and shipped to a retail chain. If they say sold, it doesn't matter and mean what you think it does (how many people bought a physical copy of the game in this case).

Does that mean 7 million people have bought FFXIII? No, it does not. Shipped to retail doesn't mean that.

Does that mean all 7 million copies will eventually be sold to consumers? No, it does not. Some copies are left unsold. All one has to do is go to a retail store, walk into the videogame section and observe. Those games you see on a store shelf? They haven't been sold to a consumer yet. Some games just don't sell and hit the trash or bargain bin. I'm sure many people still see brand new, factory sealed, copies of games that came out years ago.

Sell-through/sell-in is the number of copies a retail store sells to a customer, the people who walk into a store and buy the game. These numbers are tracked as well from organizations like Media Create, NPD and GfK to name a few. They can help us know things like how many copies of a game have been left unsold based on how many copies have been shipped to retail. The numbers kinda help with a little thing called market research too.

And publishers most of the time will never report the sell-through number in a PR statement.

With FFXIII-2, the publisher over-shipped too many copies to retail chains and got bit in the ass by price protection. Projections were way off.

To be fair, I never gave an exact number for sales because there is none.

 

[PwnTracker]

Wish this XV will have great fan like XIII has you.
Many arguments on the latest franchise, but I will surely love it.

 

[ChronoRiskbreaker]

I love Final Fantasy XIII, I know it was very controversial...

It's good to see someone else love the game here, I have not played one Final Fantasy I don't like tbh.

What controversy? lol

 

[Crystal Power]

What controversy? lol

You don't know???

The game had mixed reactions, you can see that from the first post in this thread as well.

EDIT: I mean it wasn't anything that had to be aired on CNN lol. But there was tons of debate and arguing going on over this game. Simply go somewhere and say you love this game and you can run into trouble. It's calm down now though...

 

[Jenova]

Not to sound rude, but this is "flamebait"?

 

[ChronoRiskbreaker]

You don't know???

The game had mixed reactions, you can see that from the first post in this thread as well.

EDIT: I mean it wasn't anything that had to be aired on CNN lol. But there was tons of debate and arguing going on over this game. Simply go somewhere and say you love this game and you can run into trouble. It's calm down now though...

LOL. I was just kidding! Of course, I know the controversy. Thanks for the reaction btw.

 

[Crystal Power]

LOL. I was just kidding! Of course, I know the controversy. Thanks for the reaction btw.

LOL! Okay!