I saw an article in a local Finnish paper yesterday that started me wondering if the world (and especially the world of computer gamers) has gone mad.

 

A Finnish company had spent several years creating a new game for the XBox.

 

I first wondered how they could spend more years creating this game than the XBox had been out (*) but then I moved on to the main point of the article. Apparently the company had expected sales of 2 million copies of this game but they had only sold a bit over 500,000 copies since May.

 

Are they mad ? That's two months. In those two months they have sold half a million copies.

 

If that is failure and something to be worried about then there is surely something wrong with their business model.

 

 

 

(*) The answer to the first riddle is almost certainly that they had spent n *man-years* writing the game while the journalists had corrupted that to n years.