This is incorrect. By a signficant factor. I was there when the royalty checks came in, and Arcanum did much better than that. I do not think the publisher would have written checks for copies that they hadn't sold.

I never heard a final number on ToEE, as I wasn't directly involved in it, but the number I recall for its first-month sales was more than this article claims it did overall.

I do not know any numbers on Vampire.

Here`s what NPD has to say regarding those numbers:

[quote] "I'm sorry they feel this way, but our POS numbers are dead-on. Remember that these sales figures are U.S. only. Maybe this is what has jonaac disputing the numbers?"

Well here's their stand. They say it only represents North american figures, and i'll add that they don't represent online figures, nor the actual royalty inducing figures, but just an estimate. At least for Arcanum and ToEE, i don`t have a clue on numbers regarding Vampires though.

And don't forget NPD only covers _roughly_ 60% of the North American market and nothing outside of US and Canada. I say roughly for two reasons:

1) They don't cover WalMart. My undrestanding is they extrapolate WalMart sales based on hand stock counts by NPD staff at 8 local Wal Marts to NPD.
2) When they claim to cover 60% of the market, do they mean 60% of gross unit volume, gross revenue, specific retailers, shelf space inches, or what? It's all very unclear, and I'm kinda in the know on these things. I've never had a straight answer from anybody I've every asked from marketing guru to Vice President of whosi-whatsis.

Point of data: On one of our games, NPD listed 179k units. Our royalty report from the publisher listed nearly 400k units. Using the traditional extrapolation of 60%, that's sales of 252k units to 400k units. Though my publisher may have artificially elevated their financial obligations to us in their royalty report, for some reason I doubt it.

Here's another few words along with steam that call NPD stats into question:

Amazon, Walmart.com, EBGAMES.com, etc.