Gaming is an extremely unique medium – not only in terms of its player base, the type of things it produces, but also in the way that gaming fans and companies talk about sales. We devour every single piece of information for every title, every console to fuel our own ideas about what “should” do well and what we think should sell poorly. It is a most unusual thing; since we should probably all be celebrating the entire medium – but people become, rightly, invested in things that they put their money into.

If I spend $400 on an Xbox One, for example, I might like to see it sell well – then I know more people will be online to play with me and more companies will look to bring their games to the machine. If I buy a game that I like it’s cost me $60 – if it does poorly my chances of seeing a sequel are lowered dramatically. Seeing all this information fall through does fuel the fanboy wars, but there are many other reasons we find that data so interesting.