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Mass Effect 3 Sold 1.3 Million Physical Copies in March

By Brian P Rubin | 16 April 2012 | 3 Comments   

me3 sales

In all of the uproar and falderal about Mass Effect 3’s ending, data about the game’s sales has been somewhat hard to come by—until now, that is. On Friday, Joystiq reported that, according to North American sales-tracking group NPD, Mass Effect 3 sold 1.3 million physical units for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360—a pretty impressive number.

The post offers sales data from Mass Effect 2’s release for the sake of comparison, pointing out that ME2 sold over half a million on Xbox 360 during its first month of release—while Microsoft reported that Mass Effect 3’s Xbox 360 sales were 943,000.

Of course, while these numbers are nothing to sneeze at, Electronic Arts is SNEEZING AT THEM. According to a statement given to Joystiq from EA, the NPD figures fail to account for digital sales on Origin and PlayStation 3, all of which make for an even higher, as-yet unrevealed figure for the game’s first month of sales:

“We think the monthly NPD reports are a very poor indicator of the industry’s performance given the proportion of digital sales – including digital downloads via Origin, DLC, mobile and social games and much more – that are not captured in their reports. Taking these reports as an accurate snapshot of the industry today is a dangerous assumption.”

Wow. Touchy, guys. If you wanna get all huffy about NPD’s numbers, then give us some damn numbers of your own! Personally, I thought 1.3 million was pretty good. But hey, what do I know?

Via Joystiq

3 Comments

  1. Posted by René Mathias Rojas on 16 April 12 at 10:13am

    “…according to North American sales-tracking group NPD…” Uhm… Does this involve EU and Asia too? ‘Cause alot of people here bought it.

    • Posted by Brian P Rubin on 16 April 12 at 10:18am

      Nope, I’m 99 percent sure this is just North American sales. Which is, you know, why I wrote “North American” in there.

  2. Posted by soulprovider on 16 April 12 at 4:28pm

    All this shows is that because of the quality Mass effect 1 and 2 had that several million people bought mass effect based on word of mouth around the world, that is loyalty for you, garruntee that dragon age 2 will not be able to show those numbers aster the way Bioware and EA have been handling the whole situation, we don’t like being insulted and talked down too and it will show with the next game they release.

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