Alan Wake's sales actually pushed 1.5 million

News - Official figures don't tell the whole story

Apparently, the official sales figures for Remedy's psychological thriller title Alan Wake don't tell the whole story about how well the game actually sold.

While Alan Wake only sold around 500,000 copies according to the numbers released, these do not take into account digital sales.

Alan Wake was also bundled as a digital download with the new Xbox 360 S in the US last Christmas and these sales figures were not counted in the official numbers and neither are the sales figures for Alan Wake on Games on Demand.

Estimates by IndustryGamers put this figure at somewhere around 900,000 copies in the US pushing Alan Wake's sales to nearly 1.5 million.

Remedy's Oskari Hakkinen said: "Unfortunately we can't share numbers with you... The Wake bundles are substantial, in fact about half of the story - the untold story if you like. At the end of the day, we all love to follow charts, but the most important thing for Remedy really is about knowing how many people we reach and entertain not necessarily what a measure or sales chart says."

"Alan Wake's digital bundle was the first of it's kind," he continued. "As a developer, we like testing new ground and when the digital opportunity was presented to us, we accepted. It's good to see more of it being done now as it reflects the success of the Wake bundle. To take a guess, I'd presume the reason the numbers haven't been registered is due to the untrodden ground we stepped on last year with the Wake digital bundle Digital packages now seem to be part of business as usual, as are the sales. We certainly wouldn't mind seeing those sales added to the pot also though."

A downloadable follow-up to Alan Wake is currently in development and is due to be revealed at this year's VGAs.