Riven Rocks Retailers' Bottom Line

Myst sequel Riven is currently the runaway success of the holiday season, according to PC Data.

The high-speed juggernaut racked up sales of at least 474,000 units during the month of November, the game's distributor Broderbund said Thursday. The title was released in late October.

PC Data president Ann Stephens said in a statement, "Other than Windows 95, no other title has sold so much, so fast. This breaks previous records and indicates that Riven is exceeding initial sales of Myst."

Friday's Wall Street Journal reported that Broderbund officials told analysts it has shipped 1.2 million copies of Riven since the Oct. 31 launch. And of that number, 474,000 copies have sold, leaving over 700,000 copies on store shelves.

While sales numbers are high, the paper noted that analysts were left wondering if Riven sales had fallen short of retailers' hopes.

Broderbund's Eric Winkler clarified the above statistics, and stated "The Riven sales numbers disclosed by PC Data only account for a percentage of the North American retail market through November 30. They do not account for all of the North American retail market, nor do they include even a single unit of the sales we've been so pleased with overseas. More importantly, these numbers don't include any sales information from December, which is traditionally the highest velocity for software sales in this area of the market.

Net-net, we are extremely comfortable with our current inventory level in the channel. Unfortunately, the analysts are attempting to add apples to oranges in their analysis of Riven sales. The 1.2 million units figure is our worldwide shipments across all retail channels. The 474,000 figure represents a percentage of North American retail sales through Nov. 30."