Yes, but they also said they had 300 million in sales. Assuming 60 bucks (yes PC is cheaper but there is also the CE edition so I figure that equals out a bit) that amounts to exactly 5 million copies

im one of the 20% and i know a lot of the ppl on these forums are to. but as long as i get a patch so i cab PLAY my game and they make another Fallout im happy

The steady sales after the release spike is nothing to sneeze at either. A few million copies sold a year would still be great income, and this might happen for a while.

Just because you have an issue, doesn't mean 5 million people are. You can't assume everyone is having the issues you are having. I'm seen some bugs, had a few CTD, but nothing game breaking and I am loving NV so far (120 hours in, 2nd play through). You could be in the minority. The pissed off minority is always the most vocal, hence all the forum posts. The majority of people don't get onto forums just to praise a game. People are much more likely to come to the forums to bash it. So the # of hate posts vs the # of love posts is not a representative sample.

I have had alot of problems im mad for like 2 secs when it freezes tahts about it. im still buying the next FO no matter what

Also, maybe there is a market that we don't know about. People who walk into a games store, look around and say "Nothing i want to play, not spending any money", yet never really become disillusioned and give up gaming. People with maybe 3 or 4 games in their collection, only adding games they get excited about.

just give us the patch so you can shut us all up for good!! I wont ever be on the forums cuz ill be too busy playing the game!!

Some common misconceptions are:

A ) That games are easy to make.

The PC community probably is the most vocal of the differing gaming communities about bugs and the desire for them to be fixed because they benefit from game modifications. The difference is that game mods are expanding on some small part of the product instead of trying to find and fix some small, innocuous line of code in the game's design that's causing a problem without affecting the game negatively as a whole. Developing a game and testing it takes a ton of time and manpower to manage and it's even harder to do with games that include a plethora of variables (RPGs like Oblivion and Fallout for instance). It's possible during testing that the testing staff will not run into every problem that plagues the community and probably even possible that they don't encounter any problems at all. This brings me to my next point...

B ) That developers have all the time in the world to complete their product.

They don't. I know people in the game development community and one of the common problems they seem to encounter when making a product is that they're on a deadline and a budget. If they spend too much time trying to make a product, the financing for the product could very easily fall through (we saw this with the proposed Fallout multiplayer). This is becoming more and more difficult with the rapid pace that developers have to keep up with in the gaming community to come out with new titles in order to compete in the market.

It just bugs me when people assume that gaming companies are just trying to screw them out of their money. Sure, there are cases of that happening (cough... Activision and EA games) but for the most part these game development companies are just trying to get their product out into the marketplace so they can keep getting paid. I don't know. Bethesda and Obsidian don't seem to be evil corporations out to steal gamer's money and kick them to the curb with an intentionally shoddy product. If they were, why would they bother releasing patches at all?

if they didnt patch it they would loose the hardcoe audience thats why....

speaking of the "comprehensive" patch
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/113/1132984p1.html

timefram is still kinda vague but I guess by the end of the month!!!

I wouldn't like to have a million people pissed off at me. Put it this way, that can be a million less sales for next time. Do you want that?

Ship and sold is not the same thing. For all we know, many of those copies will never leave the shelves.

I'll admit that's pretty good! It took Fo3 two years to reach 6 million. Good job Obsidian!

What percentage of profits go to Obsidian?

They SHIPPED 5 Million copies. The actual sales numbers that I managed to find claim 2 milllion copies + sold on all platforms.
This number doesn't include PC digital sales, so actual amount of copies sold could be much higher. Pretty darn impressive sales if you ask me.

jesus, with this genre getting more and more sales imagine how good TES 5 will sell.