Quote Originally Posted by Zun View Post
They had no way of knowing exactly how many people would buy their game. They, like any company, can only come up with an estimate based on trends, pre-order sales, etc.
You clearly have never had anything to do with retail. They had a pretty good idea, if they were paying attention. SE has had other games released, use the presale to launch week numbers to come up with baseline. Use that baseline ratio and multiply it against the AAR presales, and add in some cushion. With access to the numbers, anyone should beable to come up with a better idea than SE did. With 25 NA/EU servers they were only set up to accommodate 125k peak players.