Mass Effect 3 Sells 1.3 Million Copies in March

Joystiq managed to get their hands on the NPD sales numbers for March and is reporting that Mass Effect 3 sold 1.3 million copies during its launch month, with 943,000 units being on the Xbox 360 alone. Obviously digital sales aren’t included in those numbers, but to be honest, I was expecting the retail number to be considerably higher given its place as the final title in a trilogy:

Total Mass Effect 3 sales for its launch month of March were 1.3 million units across Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, the NPD informed Joystiq. The number covers purely new physical retail sales, so no digitally distributed product on PC or PS3 is tallied.

Although the NPD doesn’t publicly share sales breakdowns by platform, Microsoft executive Aaron Greenberg did share that Xbox 360 sales for the space opera were 943,000 units for the month.

What’s really worrying is that the sales number is just a fraction of the 3.5 million copies originally shipped. I can’t imagine that EA and BioWare expected to have 2 million of those copies taking up precious shelf space a month later.