We’ve already heard that Grand Theft Auto IV will probably outsell Halo 3; and this won’t be the first time Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter has estimated the game will move 9 million copies.
But now, Pachter tells the Associated Press that the game won’t sell that nine million over the course of the year, but more or less right away:
“The addressable market at launch is about 24 million consoles,” says Michael Pachter, video game analyst at Wedbush Morgan. “So how many will sell in the first week or month or few months? Nine million. That’s the number. That’s about a 35 percent attach rate.
Pachter mentions that hotly anticpiated titles like Grand Theft Auto IV are prone to rack up huge sales numbers right away, and sometimes they will “literally sell half of their lifetime units in the first week” — a trend we saw in March with the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which sold 2.7 million copies in the first month, right before sales dropped 90%.
However, Pachter believes that the final tally for GTA IV in 2008 will hit between 11 and 13 million, “because more consoles will be sold before the holidays.” This is in line with with the April 4th estimate by Hudson Square Research analyst Daniel Ernst, which Pachter had previously dismissed as “unlikely.”
But now over at GameDaily, Ernst disagrees with Pachter (indirectly) about the speed of sales — he expects the title will “sell well over a longer portion of the year.”
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