Total War: Warhammer Sales Figures

[the_eye]

Unexpectedly, ownership of Total War: Warhammer has started showing up on public Steam profiles before release. So with the caveat that the margin of error on these figures is likely to be high, here's how preorders look to be shaping up at present, compared against post-release sales of other Total War titles:


You might also be interested in alQamar's thread: TW Warhammer reviewers score hunt - comparing Rome 2 and Warhammer reviewer scoring over time.

[lavez]

'Compared against post-release sales of other Total War titles'?

What?

Here's an article from a year ago:

http://segabits.com/blog/2015/03/09/...-last-6-years/

SEGA has announced their critical acclaimed series Total War has managed to sell 11 million units between the previous 5 installments (Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2, Rome II and Attila) and a further 18 million units of DLC sold. What’s interesting to note is due to the fact that Attila is so new, it is almost assuredly that the majority of the 11 million sales is actually made up of 4 titles, showcasing just how popular the series is. Furthermore SEGA revealed that the first week sales in the UK for the latest Total War title, Attila, were 21,680 units with 81% of the sales coming from digital.

If you ignore Attila for a moment, that's an average of 2,75M sales per recent Total War title (Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2, Rome II), with Empire/Rome II arguably selling more than Shogun 2/Napoleon. For the sake of argument, let's be generous and give Attila around 500k sales in the first 3 weeks (a generous estimate by March 2015' numbers, given how the game was rumoured to sell around 800k total before the Charlemagne DLC by December 2015, and around 1M total by second half of 2016).

It's not even a 'margin of error' at this point, comparing 2,2M 'sales' from your chart (Empire, Shogun 2, Rome II) to roughly 8-8,5M actual sales of those games from last year's article. I honestly don't understand why people even bother with Steamspy and similar outlets, given how woefully inaccurate their 'data' is.

tl'dr

If flagship Total War titles (such as Empire, Shogun 2, Rome II) sold 800k copies each (or less) as implied by your chart, Creative Assembly would probably file for bankruptcy or go back to making sports/adventure games instead. Please get some real numbers for this thread.

[the_eye]

'Compared against post-release sales of other Total War titles'?

What?

Here's an article from a year ago:

http://segabits.com/blog/2015/03/09/...-last-6-years/



If you ignore Attila for a moment, that's an average of 2,75M sales per recent Total War title (Empire, Napoleon, Shogun 2, Rome II), with Empire/Rome II arguably selling more than Shogun 2/Napoleon. For the sake of argument, let's be generous and give Attila around 500k sales in the first 3 weeks (a generous estimate by March 2015' numbers, given how the game was rumoured to sell around 800k total before the Charlemagne DLC by December 2015, and around 1M total by second half of 2016).

Yes. Total War Titles continue to sell well post launch. I'm only showing the figures from the days immediately following release. If you look at the graph I posted the day before that article was published and add up the numbers you'll get roughly ten million, within a margin of error of the 11 million claimed by that article. I'd also be interested in the source of your rumours for Attila's numbers since the number of simultaneous players at launch was less than a quarter of Rome II's, which makes a 500,000 owners figure extremely unlikely, particularly given that...

It's not even a 'margin of error' at this point, comparing 2,2M 'sales' from your chart (Empire, Shogun 2, Rome II) to roughly 8-8,5M actual sales of those games from last year's article. I honestly don't understand why people even bother with Steamspy and similar outlets, given how woefully inaccurate their 'data' is.

You realise that those figures from Empire¹, Shogun 2² and Rome II³ come from Sega's financial reports, not sampling of Steam right? Sega themselves reported that those games had each sold a total of approx 600,000-800,000 units at those times.

tl'dr

If flagship Total War titles (such as Empire, Shogun 2, Rome II) sold 800k copies each (or less) as implied by your chart, Creative Assembly would probably file for bankruptcy or go back to making sports/adventure games instead. Please get some real numbers for this thread.

My numbers hold up to scrutiny. I've compared the figures my sampling generates to sales figures published by developers on numerous occasions and the figures almost always line up.

[the_eye]

Preorders continue to grow pretty linearly. If this keeps up then we're looking at about 200,000 sales by release, and if peak concurrent players follows the pattern of Atilla then you'd expect about 40,000 concurrent players at release - a fair way short of Rome II's 118,000. No guarantee preorders will remain linear though.

[the_eye]

Not so linear any more. Under twelve hours left 'til release. We could be looking at 300,000 sales as of release time 8am BST tomorrow, which would match up nicely with predictions from my wishlist tracking thread. The main question that remains now is how will the peak concurrent players compare to Rome II's 118,000?

[emcdunna]

I think the overwhelmingly positive reviews and community acceptance on Youtube has turbo charged the preorders in these past few days.

[the_eye]

Looks like preorders hit about 260,000 by 8am this morning. I expect to see sales start to tail off over the next few days.

[alQamar]

@the_eye you may also want to look into the easy steam achievement for Warhammer to see the activity of buyers. Players Peak is 113k for Warhammer to 118k Rome 2 at day one.

[the_eye]

Sales continue to climb. 113,000 peak concurrent players means nearly a third of all owners were playing at the same time yesterday.

[emcdunna]

Holy crud it's skyrocketing! Good for CA! I'm just happy people are loving the game!

[alQamar]

well we still have to stay on the ground emcdunna. One thing is sales the other thing is how much the long term retention will be, essentially important for multiplayer.
Attila and Rome 2 had no good time with that but I am more confident about Warhammer. So far the 113k peak seem still to be the peak of all times, so Warhammer did not catch Rome 2 release day yet.
There is a business holiday and extended weekend for some tomorrow, so might be this could initiate a change.

[emcdunna]

Maybe some people will wait a few days till the last day you can get chaos DLC for free...

But all in all, 113 K players is great

[Fallen851]

What a weird chart due to the lack of data for other titles. Basically, what we can infer is that the release is better than Atilla, which should surprise no one. However, it is difficult to tell whether it will level off by the time point we have data from Shogun 2, Rome 2 and Empire.

[the_eye]

You may notice that yesterday's result has changed rather significantly from the graph I posted yesterday. Each time I update the graph, the last datapoint is interpolated based on about 16 hours data output via a bodge to the code running on my server and all the other results are from a full 24 hours of data processed as they have been for over a year and a half now. Up until now these two have been very close each day. Yesterday they weren't. I'm not sure why and I need to investigate, so I've started marking the latest result as uncertain with a dashed line. If you're wondering why my results differ from Steam Spy, the answer is that their results are averaged over three days. If you do the same with my figures you get 170,000; 220,000; 290,000 compared to Steam Spy's 181,000 (11,000 difference); 225,000 (5,000 difference); 288,000 (2,000 difference). My prediction for what Steam Spy will show tomorrow is in the region of 370,000.

[lampuiho]

Warhammer is selling fewer copies (737XXX now) than Rome 2 after 30 days even though it has got Denuvo. Shows how pointless it is to cause inconvenience to the consumers.

[bisugzzz]

Warhammer is selling fewer copies (737XXX now) than Rome 2 after 30 days even though it has got Denuvo. Shows how pointless it is to cause inconvenience to the consumers.

Why do you say that it is pointless if you lose Credibility? If Warhammer Total War ended up like Rome 2. Every TW fan will lose hope on CA's future releases. Disappointed fans = less sales.

[Fanest]

Why do you say that it is pointless if you lose Credibility? If Warhammer Total War ended up like Rome 2. Every TW fan will lose hope on CA's future releases. Disappointed fans = less sales.

hes referring to Denuvo, any yeah it really is pointless

[the_mango55]

How is it an inconvenience?

[SPARTAN VI]

Although DRM is a fun topic of discussion, but it's not the topic of this discussion.

Any chance we can get a pretty new graph and sales statistics from the OP?

[Fredrin]

Although DRM is a fun topic of discussion, but it's not the topic of this discussion.

Any chance we can get a pretty new graph and sales statistics from the OP?

Yes please.

Any further news on sales figures, The_Eye?