Bioshock: Infinite soared to the top of the charts in its first week of sales here in the UK. That’s not massively surprising considering the buzz around Irrational’s third entry in the Bioshock series. Nor is it surprising that the game’s retained that top spot in the second week. What is a little odd is that Chart-Track are reporting a 75% drop in sales from last week’s numbers.
Generally a game’s highest point of sales is its debut week, that’s the first time that all the folk who haven’t pre-ordered a game can pick up a copy so, if the marketing team have been doing their job right, that’s when the most people are chomping at the bit to play said game. Every now and then games will arrive that break this tradition, games that were skirting under peoples’ radar which then get a set of great reviews, say.
It’s the sheer size of the drop-off in Bioshock: Infinite’s sales which gets me. 75%. That seems like a great many (because Chart-Track don’t see fit to publish numbers we can only assume that that’s a lot of copies not sold, it could be that it went from four sales in the first week to one in the second, for all we know.)
It could be that the marketing team did such a good job that, come second week, almost everyone who wanted to buy the game had either pre-ordered it or bought it on the day of release. We can’t know.
If another major game had released this week it’s very likely that it would have kicked Infinite from the top spot.
Also, it’s worth noting, Chart-Track doesn’t take into account digital game sales, only copies of the game bought at retail. Considering the deal offered by Green Man Gaming and the dominance of Steam for PC game shopping, Chart-Track’s figures likely have a large hole in them. Would be good to know if digital retailers saw a similar proportional drop-off in sales.