My guess is that we're going to have a Borderlands style situation, in that once word of mouth gets out about how much of a gem this game truly is, sales numbers will pick up and keep steady for a while. That is my hope at least seeing how much I'm loving this game. It's rare when a new IP impresses me this much. Congrats Arkane, you guys deserve each sale you achieve and then some.

It's a new IP, of course it's sales won't be very high at launch. Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls games sell well because people know they're going to be getting a solid product. New IP's are an unknown, you don't really know what you're getting so only the braver people will shell out the money to get it. If it's good word of mouth will spread and sales will increase.

The closest things to a CE were the Australian pre-order bonuses, at EB Games you got a collector's tin as well as the tarot card deck (which is very nice, btw, the art on the backs is gorgeous), and at JB Hi-Fi they had a t-shirt and Corvo-mask keychain. I guess if you combined them you'd have a standard sort of CE, but that would've cost $137 (minus whatever you can sell the spare game for), which is a bit pricey for what you get.

That 4 hour thing is particularly ridiculous. I'm currently at about 6 hours, and I haven't even finished the first Overseer mission.

For reals. That mission keeps on giving.

There is also one small factor that has to be taken into account. The minimum system requirements. They are ridiculous and completely wrong. I know quite a few people myself who were put off from buying it out of fear that it won't work properly, because they think it requires a minimum of 3ghz Dual Core, 4gb of ram and a GTX 460 / HD 5850, when in reality the game runs smoothly on a 2ghz DC, 2gb of ram and a low range 512mb dx9 gpu.

I don't know why (behind the scenes lobbying?) they put such false system requirements out there, but it will hurt the sales. Maybe very little, but it surely won't help them.

Amazon lists it as the http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Video-Games-Xbox-360-Hardware/zgbs/videogames/14220161/ref=zg_bs_nav_vg_1_vg seller on Xbox 360, #5 on PS3 and http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Video-Games-PlayStation-Hardware/zgbs/videogames/14210751/ref=zg_bs_nav_vg_1_vg on PC and over all http://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-video-games/zgbs/videogames That really isn't very weak and I imagine as more play it, it will continue to sell. Not sure about the lower sells on pc.

Gamerrankings have is listed as http://www.gamerankings.com/ overall in popularity.l

The release timing couldn't really be worse. A new IP competing with Borderlands 2, Torchlight 2 and an XCOM rehash? Good luck with that!

This is a bad time of the year.... lots of games coming out, often very close to each other.

I wish it the best of luck, and hope for the best.

Yeah it is tough, currently it's up against Borderlands 2, Resident Evil 6, Assassin's Creed 3, Halo 4 as several examples.
I have high hopes for the sales numbers, I am sure if we give it time, it'll even out nicely though, just as Borderlands and Darksiders eventually did in their days!

Its a new IP and therefore most likely a slow burner. We will see when it releases in europe but I think it will be a while before the sale count is high. Still think this game will do okay though, its that good and have very positive reviews to back it up.

To answer this is simple, if you had followed the devs you would have heard fairly quickly the the reason they chose the minimum requirements to be as high as they were, was to make absolutely sure, that if you met the minimum req, you would be able to run the game nice and smooth without any problems!
ALSO they've taken 1920x1080p resolution into account, so they aren't totally waay off, they've simply put a "high low" so to speak.
Honestly the game would look like serious rubbish at 800x600 with low textures, so yeah setting the bar with a certain standard is in my eyes, understandable