At tonight's EA Sports Season Opener event, Peter Moore began the presentation by stating that
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters had the best first-week sell-through sales in the franchise's history.
He attributed these strong sales to the excitement that surrounds the Masters as well as the overall quality of
Tiger 12 this year. The point about the quality of this year's title is somewhat debatable in context because Peter Moore and EA like to point to Metacritic and a score of 90 as a gold standard. So if you look at the Metacritic ratings this year, the
Tiger 12 Metacritic rating is about 80 when averaging together the Wii/360/PS3 versions of the game, which is about the same as the
Tiger 11 rating. In fact,
Tiger 12 is actually percentage points lower than
Tiger 11 if the Wii/360/PS3 scores are combined.
Regardless,
Tiger 12's 80 Metacritic score is still strong in the grand scheme of things, and it appears that the aura of the Masters was able to surpass the hits to the Tiger brand name over the last year -- at least when it comes to initial sales.
UPDATE: Destructoid's Samit Sarkar has
condensed EA's press release detailing the first-week sales for
Tiger. EA states
Tiger sold 225,000 units during its best-ever first week. However, the more impressive sales figures may be the uptick in year-over-year DLC revenues and the chart-topping iPhone version of
Tiger 12.