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See how the Vita's first-week sales stack up in this handy infographic
Sales figures can be somewhat hard to interpret on their own; what sounds impressive without context may suddenly seem far less so when seen in relation with other relevant information. It's about the big picture, and now there's an actual big picture to help put the figurative one in perspective.The above infographic (available in its entirety here) was compiled by VentureBeat using information provided by Statista. It shows how the Vita's first week of sales compares to the those seen by the DS, 3DS and PSP in different regions, as well as globally. For some bonus relevancy, it also ranks the best-selling handheld consoles of all time.If anything, it proves that tastes vary widely by region, and that relatively low first-week sales (see: PSP sales in Japan) don't necessarily translate to poor lifetime performance. It also reaffirms that infographics are the coolest way to display statistical data.
WotLK breaks internal records at EB Games
One of our secret correspondents inside an EB Games store forwarded us this picture of an internal email sent out to the videogame retail company, saying that not only was the week of WotLK's launch the biggest sales week of the year, but it was the biggest week ever outside of last year's Christmas sales, and the biggest launch the chain has ever had. Additionally, at EB Games, Wrath was the highest presale ever, the highest single-format (which means PC/Mac only) week one sales (in just two days), and the highest day one sales of any game ever, multiformat or otherwise.Pretty incredible. EB Games isn't a small company by any means, and while we knew Wrath was big, it looks like Blizzard's second WoW expansion smashed pretty much every sequel it could in the chain, even toppling some of the console gaming records. Anyone that claimed World of Warcraft had peaked with Burning Crusade should be looking pretty foolish at this point.We'll have to see where Blizzard goes from here -- there's no doubt that one reason Wrath was so popular out of the gate was that it returned to the "core" of Warcraft III: the story of Arthas and the Scourge. Can Blizzard replicate that with another expansion, no matter what the setting?
