Game sales went up 36,000% after sale. Could it be M&B?

[allthesedamnnamesaretaken]

http://kotaku.com/5156238/gabe-newells-dice-keynote-left-4-dead-sales-tf2-comic-books?skyline=true&s=x

- The benefits of Steam as a retail platform don't stop there. Newell also mentioned that for a particular third-party game (which goes unnamed), sales went up 36,000% following a weekend sale. Sure, that's a hand-picked statistic (it's just one game, and we don't know how low sales were beforehand), but it's also an enormous figure.

M&B had a massive 75% off weekend sale not too long ago that saw it priced at $7.50 (LESS THAN WHAT I PAID FOR BETA 4 YEARS AGO!). Could the explosive sales been M&B?

 

[Gamemako]

http://kotaku.com/5156238/gabe-newells-dice-keynote-left-4-dead-sales-tf2-comic-books?skyline=true&s=x

- The benefits of Steam as a retail platform don't stop there. Newell also mentioned that for a particular third-party game (which goes unnamed), sales went up 36,000% following a weekend sale. Sure, that's a hand-picked statistic (it's just one game, and we don't know how low sales were beforehand), but it's also an enormous figure.

M&B had a massive 75% off weekend sale not too long ago that saw it priced at $7.50 (LESS THAN WHAT I PAID FOR BETA 4 YEARS AGO!). Could the explosive sales been M&B?

Possible. Could also have been DoW:SS, which was 5 bucks and gave access to the DoW2 beta.

 

[Sir Prince]

I highly doubt DoW:SS sold over 37,000 copies in one sale.

But maybe.

 

[Archonsod]

Probably GTA IV. It got discounted as part of a 10% off Rockstar weekend deal about a week and a half after release ...

Though Valve did exhaust their stock of M&B keys at one point, apparently.

 

[Ringwraith #5]

Probably GTA IV. It got discounted as part of a 10% off Rockstar weekend deal about a week and a half after release ...

Nah, GTA IV sold like crazy from the start due to the hype, a discount would boost its sales further but not by several orders of magnitude.

 

[Monglor]

I think given that the sales went up by that sort of amount it's more likely to be M&B than anything else. The reason I say this is for the number to go up by that much the initial sales figure would have to be quite low, something like GTA 4 was massive when it launched, to then sell that many copies on sale it'd have to be bigger than Jesus. Mount and Blade had a fair bit of buzz about it (there was a feature on the Escapist about it that week, as well as word getting around in general that it's good), it had a demo out and it also had a pretty high price tag, which deterred quite a lot of people (myself included). All perfect conditions for it to do hugely well once its price dropped from being a significant wad of money to pocket change.

The only other possibility is that it was Soul Storm for the DoW2 beta but I think most fans would have just bought DoW2 for that, especially as many would have had Soul Storm already.

 

[Sir Prince]

I don't recall seeing M&B on the top sellers list since it was released on Steam.

 

[LazyBoy]

How about Left4Dead at $25? I got the game for $25 on Christmas (steal!). Both that and the M&B sales were a bargain (I was one of those people who bought M&B for 7.50 hehehe).

 

[Bellum]

Left4Dead is a Valve game.

 

[BadabombadaBang]

I'm pretty sure it's not M&B but if it is that's great! 

 

[Gamemako]

I don't recall seeing M&B on the top sellers list since it was released on Steam.

It was a best seller before they ran out of keys briefly during the sale: several people noted that it disappeared from the list when they ran out of keys.

 

[Coenraad]

It was Mount&Blade, it was second on the top seller list all the time during the sale, after L4d. And it ran out of keys twice.

 

[Darian]

That's incredible.

 

[Timofmars]

It had to be M&B. We're talking 36,000% increase in sales over a weekend. So it's a game was mostly unknown, suddenly put in the spotlight with a great deal for a short time. You need relatively low preceding sales figures to get a number like that.

Dawn of War is a fairly recognized series. Putting that in the spotlight and giving it a deal would bring it to the attention of those who hadn't ever seen it before, and would spur who were planning to buy or were on the fence about it... but not 36,000% worth.

Or if Dawn of War did see a 36,000% increase, then they probably wouldn't have mentioned it, because instead, they would be mentioning the 90,000% increase from M&B sales 

It certainly wasn't left 4 dead... way too popular beforehand, and the article mentions L4D specifically as seeing a 3000% increase.

 

[King Loras]

Yes, based on that figure, the unmentioned game would have to have been relatively unpopular before the sale. And I know Steam ran out of keys during the sale. So, it seems like a fair hypothesis to say that M&B was the aforementioned game. And as someone who first got interested in M&B just before the steam sale, I admit that it was the Escapist that pointed me in the right direction.