Oblivion Sales
From Voodoo Extreme(http://ve3d.ign.com/#700903):
Bethesda Softworks announced that its hit title, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has achieved record sales, reflecting huge market demand for the title. Over 1.7 million units of Oblivion for the PC and Xbox 360 have been shipped since the launch of the game.
In North America, Oblivion has become the fastest selling game released on the Xbox 360. The NPD Group Inc reports Oblivion PC as the best selling PC game, while the Oblivion Collectors Edition is ranked number 2. NPD reports that Oblivion represented approximately 13% of all PC game sales in the first week of it release, more than four times the sales volume of the next best selling title.
And it's going to keep selling.
Bethesda just saved the offline RPG, essentially, because if it had bombed, it would have been over. It would have been one of the last high-profile offline RPG's ever made. Gaming executives (never accused of in-depth thought) would have said "Oblivion, bad. World of Warcraft, good."
This is also going to spawn a bunch of articles where people say things like "Hey--five million people play WOW. And Oblivion's already sold almost two million copies. Wait a minute--it's an RPG resurgence! People actually like role-playing games BETTER than first-person shooters!"
What they'll be missing, of course, is that we care less about genre than we do about playing great games. But that doesn't really make for an interesting message, so it will just get ignored.
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