Posts Tagged ‘million’
DSi Moves One Million Units In Europe
The Nintendo DS seems posed to take the crown as the most successful gaming device ever sold. Since its original design the handheld has leaped to the top of the sales charts and sat there like a cash-spewing frog. The DSi, the newest iteration of the system doesn’t have much of significance to offer when compared to its predecessor the DS Lite, at least where gamers are concerned. It offers a relatively poor quality camera, takes away the GBA cartridge slot and lets owners listen to certain kinds of music files.
It seems that the system is even more popular than its predecessor; it has already sold over a million units across Europe since its launch in April of this year. It took a mere eight weeks to reach this milestone, a significant accomplishment when you consider that the DS Lite took thirteen weeks to sell over a million units. The previous models are still popular too, with half a million units of prior iterations being sold since the launch of the DSi.
Spore “Officially” A Hit
The story of Spore after its launch is a bit of a roller coaster. It’s filled with ups, and one particular down that 
just wont go away. Fortunately for Maxis, and specifically Will Wright, that has not prevented Spore from become a hit, and very quickly at that. Once again the Spore news hits a metaphoric crest. EA has announced that the game has gone platinum, which means, when adding the sales of both computer (Mac/PC) and DS versions, Spore has sold a million copies. This has been accomplished less than a month from the games launch in September 5th and 7th, in Europe and America respectively. The game has even managed this despite piracy, which was still significant despite the unnecessarily controversial DRM that Spore uses.
Electronic Arts is also boasting about the amount of content in the Sporepedia. At the time of the announcement, the amount of “unique” (although that is a liberal use of the word) creations was around 25 million. it is now 26.5 million. That’s is roughly five times the amount of creatures available from the Creature Creator.
A milestone? Yes it is, however, before you go off with your friends and throw a user-generated-content party, I’d like to point something out. The minimum amount of unique peaces of content players will make through the duration of the game is roughly nine to eleven. Realistically, they will make at least one new set of creations for a space colony. For arguments sake, it’s safe to say that players will make thirteen different pieces of content. If you would like to see the math behind that, say so in the comments section and I will provide it.
So if there are 26 million pieces of content, and a million players (and the DS version probably doesn’t play a huge role in that), then players are only playing the game twice, or else only making two variations of each piece of content. Thus, people are missing the point, and the fun, of Spore.