On it's own, no way has Uncharted sold 2million. It never charted in NPD's here. It had a mid range debut in the UK and hung around the low end of the Top 40 for a bit and then fell off. I'd question even 1 mil on it's own.
Uncharted is an internet praised game. It's actual sales were simply not that good for whatever reason. I'd say the lack of a good MP and co-op hurt the game. An 8hour SP with little replay ability (unless you want to collect items) is what did it in, atleast in the US. Hyping it to the moon by the same people repeatedly doesn't mean it translated to sales.
), and I certainly know what I'm buying before paying for it. But I wonder how much that's representative of the majority buyers. Out of the millions of AC buyers, how many knew exactly what they were getting including length and variety of gameplay? Of those who bought Uncharted, how many knew the balance of shooting to platforming and based their purchasing decision on that? Visitng a site like Eurogamer and looking at something like the Most Wanted counts of games, you're seeing only a few hundred votes. That to me suggests visitors don't number the millions, and the majority of salesmanship has to work outside of the gaming press. In that respect, I'm not entirely convinced that the game itself, all its good points and bad points, is the major selling point. But then I haven't looked at the stats for sales, IPs, ratings and so forth. Ostepop says there's a correlation between score and sales, which I think would be an influencing factor, friends recommending a title. You know how it is, whenever a person clueless in a field wants to get something, they ask their friend/family member who reads up on such things for their recommendation, whether its hi-fi's, TVs or whatever. Marketing perhaps needs to work on first establishing a title as hyped-to-the-nines for the web population, who'll then report their expertise to the greater population, and then follow that up with national media advertising adding to that positive affirmation of 'this expert says its a good game' with a 'ooh, this looks cool' and creating an interest to own. I think that has been the case with the really big sellers. If so, there's a notion that mainstream gamers aren't that choosy, and a moderate title could do well. The trick there would be generating build-up 'expert' hype across the internet despite having a lacklustre product. If you have a AAA showing, it's easy to crank up the hypometer and influence buyers.
