Questionable Figures

Turns out Microsoft have decided to release a few figures today on the ‘success’ of casual dumb-a-thon 1 versus 100. Sadly said stats didn’t concern the number of individuals who couldn’t identify the falsehood of Britain’s war against Belgium, but some solid numbers on downloads and participation. It turns out the program has been downloaded over 2.5 million times by curious dashboard browsers, with single night cumulative player totals reaching an impressive-sounding 215,000 for Europe and a slightly less so 230,000 for the USA. Also of interest were figures released for simultaneous play, stating that some 79,000 players had been competing in the game GB & Ireland room.

Now, while this is technically true, this number sounds suspiciously like the amount we can remember seeing back on July 10th, before the title’s popularity spectacularly receeded. From that initial high figure games seemed to have levelled off around the 20,000 competitor mark, a figure that leads us to beleive much of the credit for Microsoft’s cumulative player figure must be taken by the beta’s first few weeks, too.

Having thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of the quiz (barring its encyclopedic extended play football outings) we’re actually relatively sad to have to point this out, but correct slightly misleading statements we must…