Gothic 3 - Tops German Sales @ Worthplaying
 

Worthplaying has a newsbit about the apparent sales success of Gothic 3 in Germany and the UK:

After two days of sales, Gothic III and Gothic III Collector's Edition are sitting pretty atop Germany's media Control Charts, placing first and second, respectively. More than 100,000 copies were sold in the first weekend, making Gothic III the most successful game of the year in Germany. On the UK sales charts, Gothic III placed 4th.

More information

Their source must have been this official PR…

Gothic 3 Peaks The Charts

1st and 2nd place in Germany – 4th place in UK

Liezen, Austria, 18th of October 2006; Gothic 3 peaks the charts! After 2 days of sales, the roleplaying game from Germany climbs on the 1st place in Germany’s media Control Charts. Close to this the Gothic 3 Collector’s Edition reaches the 2nd place. More than 100.000 sold pieces through in the first weekend makes Gothic 3 being the most successful game of the year in Germany.

With the third part of the much loved roleplaying-series developer Piranha Bytes, Publisher JoWooD Productions and Co-Publisher Deep Silver are now looking forward with plans to build from the great platform provided by the German games marketplace. Gothic 3 places on the 4th place in UK charts and is one of the most sold products of the week in Great Britain.

Gothic 3 – available for PC DVD ROM!

That's really good … I wonder how it will sell in the US?

Probably solid numbers but for a rather low average retail price.

The German press release talks about more than 150k in the first few days.
To put this into perspective:
100k -> gold award
250k -> platinum award
100k -> major hit
300-500k -> good chance to become the most successful game of the year.

There´s 1 week left to win the masses. Then Anno 1701 comes out …

Is that highly anticipated over there? It doesn't seem to even be on the radar here - I'll be reviewing it and hopefully getting it fairly soon, but I'm in the dark about it …

Anno 1602 and 1503 were the two most successful games ever in Germany. AFAIR 1503 was the bst selling game of the year two times in a row. In year one it needed a few weeks to blow away Warcraft 3, the other year it slowly sold another 250k or so.

Sunflowers wrote they´ve invested 17 (or 16?) Mio EUR into Paraworld and Anno 1701. Far Cry reportedly cost 6.5 Mio. All previews say that 1701 is in good condition, looks very expensive and sounds phenomenal due to real 5.1 orchestra recordings (instead of upmix).

edit: the Anno franchise sold about 4.5 Mio units, a large chunk of this in the German speaking countries.

The Anno games beat titles like Oblivion and World of Warcraft in Germany? Here in Scandinavia they were hardly even worth mentioning as far as I know.

Then you should be interested in this - "Nintendo DS News | Anno Announced for DS"

They have a bunch of screens as well.