Today something unprecedented happened -- for us anyway.  Several retail chains re-ordered more units in a single go than their initial order. EB Canada, for instance re-ordered a very large number. Yay Canada!

See, typically what happens at retail is that you get your initial "sell-in".  Re-orders are only designed to bring stocking levels back to that initial sell-in level. So over time, the game fades away. It's very unusual for a game to actually increase its retail stocking after the release.

So now we're in unknown territory.  We no longer have any idea how many units the game will sell.  The first one sold roughly 75,000 units in North America and roughly that many overseas / electronic. We've shipped around 50,000 so far and we're starting to run into a back order so availability is going to get tight in the coming days as we're now rush manufacturing another batch to handle. 

This all happened before the reviews even started to come out. The reviews should certainly help. But it goes to show how powerful word of mouth is.  And if there's other small developers out there, bear in mind, Galactic Civilizations II had only a handful of full time developers and roughly that many artists on it.  If you're at home, open up one of your game manuals and look at the credits to see what's the norm. 

You can be a small development house and still make a game people like. Word of mouth is absolutely crucial. I also am convinced that having the developers themselves interact in the forums directly is important as well. It lets us hear issues people run into.  We've also learned a lot in the process.  I also think that putting out timely regular updates is key as well. In fact, we're planning to put up the final version of 1.0X tonight.  Lots of new video options, AI tweaks, glitch fixes, that nasty hard drive formatting bug if you're using an ATI or nVidia card (just kidding) should help spice things up.

Once 1.0X is out, we'll start talking about what we want to do with 1.1.  We have a lot of ideas ranging from random alien players, being able to create your own custom players, UI support for mods, and of course putting in user requested features, tweaks, etc.  But that'll be in a few weeks.  1.0X will likely be the version where we take a bit of a breather.  People who visit our IRC channel (#galciv on irc.stardock.com) will be able to access our daily internal build if they're feeling particularly masochistic.

So stay tuned, we'll keep you informed on how things are going.  And don't forget, if you see the game at a retail store, take a picture, put it up in this thread, and win a chance to get a free GalCiv II T-shirt.

You'll be able to get updates over in the Downloads area.