Mass Effect 3 Ships 3.5 Million Copies in First Week

By Brian P Rubin | 09 March 2012 | 14 Comments

Today, EA published a press release announcing that the latest installment in developer BioWare’s sci-fi epic saga, Mass Effect 3, has shipped 3.5 million units globally in its first week of release. To offer a point of comparison, Activision boasted an estimated 6.5 million units sold in the first 24 hours of Modern Warfare 3’s release in November.

The fact that Mass Effect 3 has shipped so many units during a non-holiday season is pretty impressive—and I’m eager to learn how many of those units have sold.

Sadly, like Skyrim before it, this is one of those games everyone is playing that I’m sitting out of. The weather’s starting to get nice, and I know that Mass Effect 3 would just make me more agoraphobic than usual. But I think I’ll check it out when the game eventually goes on sale in a couple months…stay tuned for some more hard sales numbers over the next few days and weeks.

Anyone out there pick up one of these 3.5 million copies of the game? What do you think?

14 Comments

Posted by Mike on 09 March 12 at 2:48pm

Don’t waste your time Brian. The game is absolutely fantastic and one of the greatest pieces of videogame art…right up until the final five minutes which ruined the entire franchise for me.
Posted by Lawrence Sonntag on 09 March 12 at 3:10pm

Everyone’s hating on the ending of ME3 it seems. Makes me scared to keep playing…
- Posted by Mike on 09 March 12 at 4:12pm
  
  Its a damn shame Lawrence. Polls on the Bioware Social Network reveal 96% of fans absolutely hated the endings. I’m definitely entrenched in that number. Shit, I’ve written about five essays in the past two days about how bad it was. I haven’t written this much since college.
- Posted by Matt on 09 March 12 at 8:13pm
  
  Honestly the ending was bittersweet, but that was kind of the point. Honestly, it just seems like a lot of people are acting butt hurt because they didn’t get their perfect fairytale ending where everything is nice, and perfect. It made sense based on what was happening in the story, and I found it to be pretty fitting.
  - Posted by Mike on 09 March 12 at 8:36pm
    
    I personally was fully expecting a bittersweet ending (as most people did). I even expected Shepherd (SPOILER) to die, hell kinda of even wanted it. I had a big problem that all the decisions that you made in the previous games didn’t matter at all, that they pulled the Guardian character right out of their ass, and there really is only one ending just with three different colors. It was lazy storytelling at best and completely out of place for the ME universe.
    - Posted by Brownee on 12 March 12 at 10:37pm
      
      *SPOILERS*
      
      Hell, I’ll admit I didn’t want him to die, but I’ve dealt with characters I like dying before, I could do it again…. well not really, my main issue was that he just got screwed over in ways that don’t even make sense. All that time and effort (in character sense, not mine :P) of gathering forces, shutting down Cerberus, creating peace between all races… and regardless of what Shepard wanted or believed, he willingly beds over and takes a fucking because the machine they guilt only gives him 3 choices that’ll kill him, all having some weird problem in the process… I mean don’t say Up yours to the kid and go rummage around the citadel for another way to shut down the reapers giving the force you’ve built up a better chance to destroy them and go live with *insert romance partner here* and *insert action they wanted to do here* with them, noooooooo, go against the whole built up aspect of free will and make a decision that just came right the fuck out of nowhere that’ll kill you…
      
      That’s my only issue really, that last 5 minutes just came right out of nowhere, for no reason, with some stupid last minute decisions… it’d actually make far more sense for a silly, but happy fairytale ending. Would give all the crap you’ve done a reason to even be there…
- Posted by Grim Joker on 10 March 12 at 8:33pm
  
  The ending is really horrible. You work so hard and in the end they basically say “Okay well that was all pointless! Now make a choice, all of which end up doing the same exact thing in almost the same exact way!”
Posted by LimeDude on 10 March 12 at 8:32am

My “idiot friends” hate Mass effect for some reason. :-(
Posted by Mugenite on 10 March 12 at 10:59am

I conquered Saren… I defeated the Collectors… Now? I make the most difficult decision yet…

Liara…? or Tali…?

P.S. I did not buy ME3 yet, but I will be picking up my sweet copy tomorrowz!!!
Posted by Jessey on 10 March 12 at 5:38pm

Well i would say wait for steam sales but fucking EA and their origin bs…….. Well ea still has some pretty decent sales but it’ll be awhile.
Posted by DJ_Aldesso on 11 March 12 at 11:07am

FUCK. I hate it that EA made me boycot mass effect 3
Posted by 6souls on 11 March 12 at 1:18pm

ME3 in a nutshell;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHS7xexH8kA

Still fun as hell to play. Every ending is basically a “kill everyone” ending. In the ME2 DLC “The Arrival,” you destroy a relay which in turn destroys most of the planets in the area. You’ve sent your force to Earth, now your “good” ending is to destroy the relays. You’ve just fucked them..
Posted by Nitefall on 13 March 12 at 2:57am

Mass effect 3 ending would have been complete in my eyes if instead of that terrible ending, they just kept shepard sitting there looking at space and seeing the reapers being destroyed, then to end the story they’d share some knowledge about major people, groups and planets about what happened to them after everything turned out.
- Posted by Mugenite on 22 March 12 at 7:04am
  
  SPOILERISH – BUT NO ACTUAL SPOILERS
  
  Well, I agree to some extent. I did feel like I had gone through hell to unite all those factions against the Reapers, but never found out what happened after the fight. It felt even more awkward to just be dropped back into my previous save after beating the game. However, my guess is that Bioware could not handle making an ending too diversified by all the choices we made thus far. So they chose to make a split path ending for us to decide. It was kind of a Deus Ex: HR ending type, which made me kind of upset. However, being able to see Tali’s face on a horribly pixilated picture was well worth the 60 bucks alone… :D