Keep in mind that in the west, most big chains have reimbursement plans (price protection) with the publishers. That means that if they end up with extra stock that they can't sell, they drop the price on the game and the publisher gives them a credit for the drop in price. As far as I know, this sort of protection still doesn't exist in Japan (at least not widely), which is why Japanese retailer orders are usually pretty close to what they actually sell, whereas in the west, retailers often order far more than they can sell.
For this reason, worldwide shipment numbers don't mean nearly as much as most people think they do. When publishers make sales estimates for a game, they are hoping that the game sells that much
at full price. But when we get the actual shipment numbers from the publisher, we don't get the actual price that those shipments actually sold for. Something like Dark Void for example, the final shipment numbers have no bearing whatsoever on how the game performed, because the vast bulk of those shipment numbers were at heavily discounted prices. So yeah, Capcom might have managed to squeeze out 700k or whatever, but they didn't come anywhere close to getting to full value for 700k units.
Of course, for games like most of Nintendo's evergreens, Call of Duty, etc. - we can be sure that those shipment numbers are full value figures - but for a lot of other stuff the worldwide shipment numbers don't necessarily mean a whole heck of a lot in terms of the revenue that the game brought in for the publisher.
It depends on the publisher and the clout of the retailer, but most publishers offer price protection to most of their retailers. (Nintendo is actually pretty notorious for not offering price protection - which helps explain why Nintendo products tend to suffer more shortages than other companies - retailers are more hesitant to order too much stock that they might not be able to sell). Then again, Nintendo products are also famous for holding their prices far longer than other publishers. Link to interesting article on pricing --
http://blog.videogamepricecharts.com/2010/01/2009-game-publisher-resale-value-report.html
But generally speaking, you can bet your ass that all those games that are wildly overshipped to retail are covered by price protection. Which means that the shipment figures for those titles are next-to-meaningless, because the publisher often pays the retailer back for a huge portion of that channel stuffing. Plus, as an added bonus, the publisher still has to pay the full licensing fees to Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft (generally $8-$10 per game) for each and every copy shipped based on the full retail pricing, even though the publisher ended up refunding a chunk of that pricing back to the retailer.
For something like Dead To Rights Retribution, it is possible that the publisher might have managed to stuff the U.S. retail channel with several hundred thousand copies. But with actual sales such as those reported here, the price would be dropped pretty quickly to start to move the excess stock, and Namco would credit the discounts back to the retailers.
It's just another example of the massive short-sighted nature of many publishers. They just want to stuff as many units as possible into the channel so that they can put that revenue on their books to make the current quarter look better. Of course, then the following quarter all the credits come due, so they need something to offset all those credits in the following quarter - so they try to stuff the channels with another game. Before you know it they are in an endless cycle like this just trying to keep each current quarter looking rosy - to hell with the future, worry about that when it comes.
Didn't really like the Demo so I'll just wait until I can get it cheap somewhere.
